This article is published in partnership with the Center for Media and Democracy.
On August 6, journalists from Fox News embedded with U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents for the now infamous “Trojan Horse” raid on a Home Depot in Los Angeles. Their exclusive report opens from inside a Penske truck (rented against company policy) as agents burst out and detain 16 undocumented immigrants lured there by the offer of work.
Two days later, a different set of journalists were injured and arrested by Los Angeles law enforcement officers while reporting on protests against that and other immigration raids in the area.
The contrast illustrates the dilemma media organizations face as the Trump administration escalates its crackdown on a free press: get safe access to events as they’re happening but run the risk of compromising basic standards of journalistic integrity, or do the challenging work of reporting—potentially putting one’s body on the line.
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The report from Fox follows a trend. Journalists from that network, NBC, ABC, CBS, The New York Times, the New York Post, and Newsmax have all embedded with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and CBP operations over the past nine months under the umbrella of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), giving the operations a publicity boost while leaving key claims about DHS enforcement policies unquestioned.
At the same time, the government has violently cracked down on journalists covering ICE raids and protests against DHS operations, with federal agents and local law enforcement officers seriously injuring reporters in Los Angeles as the Trump administration has pursued a broad-based immigration and civil liberties assault in and around the city. In mid-July, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem claimed that videotaping ICE officers doing their work is an act of “violence,” and in August a spokesperson for DHS told the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) that making videos of ICE agents at work and posting them online is “doxing” and will be prosecuted.
Using embedded reporters has allowed DHS to shape its own narrative about what it wants Americans to hear—that the department is only targeting the “worst of the worst” immigrants who have committed violent crimes, even though they rarely provide supporting evidence.
Among recent examples of embedded reporting on ICE by these major news outlets:
- On September 9, Fox News reporters embedded with an ICE raid in Chicago called “Midway Blitz.” The footage shows ICE agents piling on top of a Mexican man who Fox reported had been charged with assault and felony re-entry to the U.S. At the end of May, Fox News reporter Bill Melugin joined ICE agents in Boston as they made a broad sweep in which they touted the arrest of a Salvadoran immigrant who allegedly was convicted of child rape, along with a fugitive allegedly wanted for murder and kidnapping. Fox reporters also rode along with ICE agents in Maryland last December (before Trump took office), in Boston in January, in Colorado in April, in Florida in May, and in Connecticut in August. In its reporting on each operation, Fox dutifully reinforces DHS messaging that ICE is only rounding up “egregious criminal alien offenders” who endanger American citizens.
- In December 2024, NBC reporter Gabe Gutierrez rode along with now-acting ICE Director Todd Lyons, who at the time was the agency’s assistant director of field operations. The report voluntarily blurred ICE agents’ faces, and granted anonymity to two ICE officials who claimed that the agency was facing a $230 million shortfall, an amount that NBC did not appear to independently verify. Gutierrez did not challenge or ask follow-up questions when Lyons claimed that sanctuary states and cities put ICE agents at risk.
- Rachel Scott from ABC embedded with ICE agents and Secretary Noem in March as they raided a home in Virginia to arrest an immigrant who had allegedly been charged with sexual battery and who had re-entered the U.S. illegally after being deported twice. They also detained another undocumented relative in the house who was ordered to report to ICE in 48 hours after he had placed two minor children who are American citizens with other family members.
- In July, CBS’s Camilo Montoya-Galvez tagged along with ICE agents in Maryland, where ICE arrested an Ethiopian man who had purportedly been prosecuted for second-degree rape. CBS repeated a DHS claim that there had been an 800 percent increase in violence against ICE officers. A few days later, a DHS spokesperson told CMD that that number had risen to “1,000 percent” but refused to provide any data to support that claim. CBS host Tony Dokoupil reported in the segment that “people on the far left think that everyone should be able to stay,” without providing any corroborating evidence for that misleading generalization.
- Reporters for The New York Times’ popular podcast The Daily embedded with an ICE raid in early June. While the podcast raised major concerns and questions about the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, it is unclear whether reporters independently verified that the prime target of the operation, an immigrant named Jerlien Iswola Rivera, had actually committed sexual battery on a minor.
- In January, reporters from the New York Post joined a team of ICE agents in Chicago to “arrest criminal illegal migrants,” as they put it, but arrested only two Venezuelan nationals despite the efforts of roughly 100 agents to round up more deportees. The Post article blames a “left-wing ecosystem” of “local activists, legislators and school administrators” for helping immigrants evade ICE. It also rehashes the DHS narrative that its agents are the victims of this resistance in a city it vilifies as a sanctuary space.
None of these news organizations responded to questions from CMD about whether they independently verified DHS claims about the people who were detained in these operations, nor can CMD find evidence of follow-up reporting about the specific individuals affected by the operations.
Kelly McBride, senior vice president and chair of the Craig Newmark Center for Ethics and Leadership at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, said that embedded journalism raises concerns, especially if statements made by government officials go unchallenged or uninvestigated.
“There’s no way you get a full and accurate picture of what ICE is doing in an embed. There’s just no way,” McBride said. “The question is: What’s the journalistic purpose of the story you’re trying to tell? And what is the value of the material you get out of the embed?”
Footage is a major motivator for broadcast news organizations, McBride argued. “For TV it’s to get footage, but that can be very irresponsible. That footage is very powerful and can misrepresent the totality of the picture.”
McBride placed particular emphasis on the need for news organizations to verify claims made by government officials.
“Any information that law enforcement provides needs to be verified,” she said. “If they say they arrested this person, where are the records of that arrest? If they say this person has a prior charge, where are those charges documented? Who can you talk to … to find out more information about that crime?”
McBride explains that embeds must be placed in the context of being able to develop a more complete picture of law enforcement operations as a whole—that the embed itself shouldn’t constitute the entire story. “I’m not going to say never ever go on an embed,” she added, pointing out that “you might be able to develop relationships with ICE officers.” As a former police reporter, she says she “used to go on ride-alongs all the time, but it was to [find and develop new] sources.”
“Not telling the [full] story is not an option,” McBride concluded. “As a journalist you do not want to be a mouthpiece for the government. Whatever you portray the government saying, you have to be able to [substantiate it]—to tell your audience that we believe this is true, or we believe this is a distortion, or we believe this is not true.”
While ICE has failed to provide evidence supporting its claims of a 1,000 percent increase in violence against its officers, there is extensive documentation of government officials using violence against immigrant detainees. Earlier in August, a report from U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) found 510 credible reports of human rights violations in immigration detentions since Trump retook office on January 20, 2025.
The administration has repeatedly misled the public about prior claims of detaining only “the worst of the worst” migrants charged with criminal behavior. When 238 ICE detainees were deported to an infamous supermax prison in El Salvador in March, officials claimed they were mostly gang members, murderers, and rapists. But a review by Bloomberg News found that 90 percent of the men deported without due process had no criminal record other than minor traffic or immigration offenses. NPR found that one-third of the 177 Venezuelans who were initially held at the U.S.’s notorious Guantanamo Bay detention center in Cuba and then flown back to Venezuela in February had no criminal record. And an analysis by FactCheck.org concluded that more than a third of the 600,000 immigrants border czar Tom Homan claimed were violent criminals only had histories of traffic or immigration offenses.
Further raising doubts about the reliability of DHS messaging, an investigation by The Guardian in July found that based on false and misleading statements by DHS officers, the department has had to drop charges against at least eight of the 26 people arrested during the massive anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles in June.