A photo of a five-year-old boy sits at the summit of the mountain of lies told by local politicians and the Minnesota media about the actions of ICE during Operation Metro Surge. Despite Homeland Security aggressively debunking the claim that ICE detained a five-year-old child this week, our local media ran with the story anyway, prominently featuring the photo of the child in every story. The photo will no doubt be nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, even though the story behind it is completely false.
The worst offender, of course, is the Minnesota Star Tribune, running a front-page, above-the-fold article with the headline, “Children as young as 5 detained.”
The narrative and photo are disproved in paragraph five of the story with information from Homeland Security explaining how the father abandoned the child when he fled from arrest. But the Star Tribune frames it as a “he said, she said” with bystanders disputing what federal officials said. Every other mainstream media company in Minnesota ran with the same narrative and photo, most of them also including quotes from Homeland Security debunking the entire narrative.
Homeland Security aggressively pushed back against the story on social media, posting directly to local politicians like Tim Walz, Jacob Frey, Ilhan Omar and Amy Klobuchar.
During an expansive press conference yesterday in Minnesota, Vice President JD Vance explained how ICE officers took care of the boy after he was abandoned by his family.
“So the story is that ICE detained a five-year-old? Well, what are they supposed to do? Are they supposed to let a five-year-old child freeze to death? Are they not supposed to arrest an illegal alien in the United States of America?”
But it was too late. The narrative had taken hold, and average Minnesotans were left with the image of the 5-year-old standing in the cold “arrested” by ICE. Minnesota leaders and their friends in the press have decided that since the ICE mission is wrong in their eyes, we can dismiss anything they say and rely instead on the activist class for their version of what’s happening on the ground.
Everyone claims to want the temperature turned down surrounding Operation Metro Surge. That will only happen when elected leaders and the Minnesota media seek the truth and eschew false narratives.