An Ecuadorian man abandoned his five-year-old son while fleeing ICE. Americans were led to believe agents kidnapped the boy.
Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks. This week, we look at another round of misinformation around ICE detentions, and cover more media misses.
Did ICE Abduct a Five-Year-Old Child?
When will the legacy media learn that stories that seem too “good” to be true, usually are?
Reporters were quick to toss away their skepticism in recent days when met with a story that perfectly fit their narrative that evil Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents are disappearing people; several major outlets ran stories suggesting ICE agents in Minnesota detained a five-year-old boy on his way home from preschool in an effort to lure his father out for arrest.
The claims originated with Democratic lawmakers, including Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Representative Ilhan Omar, and quickly proliferated in the mainstream media. “ICE’s detention of child puts new focus on Trump team’s tactics,” Axios said. “5-year-old boy taken by ICE in Minneapolis area being held with father at Texas facility,” CNN reported. Similar headlines could be found at the Associated Press and ABC News. The Washington Post, meanwhile, reported on the case of the five-year-old, and other students from the same district, reporting “ICE detains four children from Minnesota school district, including 5-year-old.”
The Department of Homeland Security was quick to correct the record: ICE agents “stayed with a child who was abandoned by his father — an illegal alien from Ecuador.” The White House criticized the news outlets for publishing a “fake Democrat narrative without first getting the facts.”
“ICE did NOT target a child. The child was ABANDONED,” DHS wrote on X. “On January 20, ICE conducted a targeted operation to arrest Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias, an illegal alien from Ecuador who was RELEASED into the U.S. by the Biden administration.”
“As agents approached the driver Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias fled on foot — abandoning his child. For the child’s safety, one of our ICE officers remained with the child while the other officers apprehended Conejo Arias,” it added.
“Parents are asked if they want to be removed with their children, or ICE will place the children with a safe person the parent designates. This is consistent with past administration’s immigration enforcement,” the agency said.
In a follow-up post, DHS explained that officers “made multiple attempts to get the mother inside the house to take custody of her child.”
Even when officers assured the woman they would not take her into custody, she apparently refused to take custody of the child. Officers then “abided by the father’s wishes to keep the child with him,” and the duo was sent to Dilley Immigration Processing Center.
An attorney for the family told CNN they are “not illegal aliens” and presented themselves to border officers in Texas in December 2024 to apply for asylum. “They were following all the established protocols, pursuing their claim for asylum, showing up for their court hearings, and posed no safety, no flight risk and never should have been detained,” the attorney said.
American Compass managing editor Drew Holden wrote a post on X calling attention to the media “hoax” around the five-year-old’s detention, explaining that he grew skeptical upon seeing that the “details didn’t add up.”
“Washington Post claimed both that the father had fled ICE and been in the house when agents allegedly tried to ‘lure’ him out,” Holden explained.
The outlet later added a correction to the piece: “A previous version of a caption incorrectly said that Liam Ramos was used as bait to lure his father out of his house. It was to lure other people.”
And while each of the stories mentioned that the father abandoned the child, it took several paragraphs for readers to reach that revelation. Readers of the Daily Beast had to wait 13 paragraphs to receive that information, while the Washington Post mentioned the father had abandoned the child in the fifth paragraph.
The outlets apparently learned nothing from a similar narrative that played out back in September, when NBC News was forced to correct a story that claimed ICE agents held a young autistic girl captive in order to pressure her illegal immigrant father to surrender to authorities. In that case, again, DHS clarified that the man had actually abandoned his daughter while fleeing agents.
A correction on that article says, “An earlier version of this article mischaracterized the activities of ICE agents in the video. The article has been updated.”
The failure to greet these stories with a healthy dose of skepticism has real-world consequences, as they add fuel to the fire of already overheated tensions between ICE and its detractors, particularly in the case of the story in Minnesota, where protests and riots have broken out in response to the agency’s increased enforcement. Tensions have only risen in recent weeks with the shooting deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, both of whom were killed by ICE agents while protesting the agency’s activities.
Video footage of the shooting shows Good behind the wheel of an SUV parked perpendicularly to the road to block off a street where ICE operations were taking place. Good drives the vehicle forward as an ICE agent approaches from the front. The agent opens fire as the vehicle approaches, firing once through the windshield and twice more through the driver’s side window.
Pretti was protesting an immigration enforcement operation when he tried to assist a woman who was shoved by an officer, and was then tackled to the ground by agents himself. Pretti was armed, and preliminary information suggests one agent disarmed Pretti at the same moment another officer opened fire.
As NR’s Andy McCarthy wrote in the wake of Pretti’s death, “A situation that was already a tinder box now verges on an inferno.”
Headline Fail of the Week
Turning Point USA CEO Erika Kirk recently hit back at a Washington Post style column that criticized her wardrobe: “Erika Kirk is walking a fine line in a glittering pantsuit,” the column’s headline read.
“Kirk, a mother to two toddlers, continues to take on public-facing leadership duties while promoting traditional ideas about prioritizing marriage and motherhood, and her clothes are attempting to walk the same high wire . . . her styling of late suggests that she’s aware that she now needs to be able to blend into mainstream, secular, political contexts well enough to be taken seriously — but not so well as to be mistaken for a career woman or a feminist,” Washington Post fashion writer Ashley Fetters Maloy wrote.
Kirk blasted the article in comments at a stop on Turning Point’s “Make Heaven Crowded” tour.
“We live in a culture that is just endlessly curious about things that don’t matter,” she said. “I mean, for example, I had a Washington Post article come out about the clothes that I wear. Like, very slow news day out there.”
“If you are now attacking a widow’s attire, like, that’s where we’re at,” she said, before going on to tell the paper to “go touch grass.”
Media Misses
• Cameron Kasky, a survivor of the Parkland school shooting who has since become a gun control activist, appeared on CNN last week and falsely claimed that President Trump was part of a “human sex trafficking network.” During a panel discussion about Trump’s interest in acquiring Greenland, and the president’s suggestion that that interest led him to miss out on the Nobel Peace Prize, Kasky said, “I would love it if [Trump] was more transparent about the human sex trafficking network that he was a part of, but you can’t win them all.” When CNN host John Berman didn’t challenge Kasky’s comments, conservative panelist Scott Jennings stepped in: “You gonna let that sit? Are we going to claim here on CNN that the president is part of a global sex trafficking ring?””We’re going to talk about the Epstein files. Scott, I will do the fact-checking as we go along here,” Berman said, before asking Kasky to repeat his claim.”That Donald Trump was provably very involved with it,” Kasky said.”Okay, we’ll get to that later. Donald Trump has never been charged with any crimes in relation to Jeffrey Epstein,” Berman replied.Kasky issued what appeared to be a sarcastic apology the next day: “I would like to retract my comments from CNN last night and truly apologize. Donald Trump was obviously not involved with a giant international child sex trafficking ring where women and children were systematically raped by elites. I said that by accident and didn’t mean it.”
• MS NOW anchor Chris Hayes said Trump is causing the world order to become “unstable” and suggested the U.S. has possibly become “one of the bad guys.””What we are dealing with today is what happens when the winners of World War II, one of them, realized the order they built is crumbling and that the global hegemon is sounding and maybe acting now like an Axis power,” he said. “Maybe we’re the bad guys. And these allies are getting a daunting awareness that Americans in the anti-Trump camp have had from day one.”