After nearly two years of Fox News claiming that President Donald Trump’s deportation operations were targeting the so-called “worst of the worst,” the administration has acknowledged that it is indeed attempting to go after every person it thinks is in the United States without authorization.

The administration’s confirmation that it is not prioritizing people with violent criminal convictions and is in fact seizing anybody it believes to be deportable, even against court orders, undercuts Fox News’ narrative that the mass deportation effort is about public safety rather than maintaining structures of white supremacy through ethnic cleansing.

On September 26, right-wing media outlet The Daily Wire reported that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers “were told this weekend to cease arrests of all non-criminals,” citing “agency sources.” The Daily Wire added that “federal immigration agents may only arrest illegal immigrants with criminal convictions or charges for the time being” and suspected immigrants “who have final deportation orders but lack criminal convictions or charges will not be arrested.”

The Department of Homeland Security quickly responded to the article on social media, calling the report “false” and clarified that “no one is off the table.” Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin reported on social media that the initial “verbal guidance did go out” but that it was “erroneous” and “there is no change in immigration enforcement policy,” citing a phone call with Trump and sources in ICE and the Department of Homeland Security.

On September 28, Melugin repeated his reporting on Fox News’ America’s Newsroom. He said that on Saturday, “multiple ICE sources at different offices across the country … did receive some verbal guidance, a verbal directive from agency leadership telling them they were no longer allowed to arrest illegal aliens if they didn't have a criminal history."

“Senior DHS sources then told Fox News that guidance was a miscommunication and a mistake, and it was almost immediately rescinded,” Melugin continued. “In a phone call with me over the weekend, President Trump told me there are no changes to his mass deportation agenda and everybody in the country illegally remains on the table for ICE arrest and removal regardless of any criminal history."

As the American Immigration Council’s Aaron Reichlin-Melnick noted in his initial response to The Daily Wire report, the change in policy “would be *enormous* if true, as since July the majority of all ICE arrests are people with no criminal record."

Fox News’ commitment to the false “worst of the worst” talking point

From the earliest days of Trump’s second term, Fox News has worked overtime to paint people held in ICE custody as violent criminals, terrorists, and gang members.

• In reality, since January 2025, the percentage of ICE arrestees with a criminal conviction has tended to hover around 30%, with many of those convictions being for low-level offenses like traffic violations.
• According to a study from libertarian think tank the Cato Institute published in November 2025, only 5% of people held by ICE in the first weeks of fiscal year 2026 had violent criminal convictions.
• In February, CBS News reported that “less than 2% of those arrested by ICE over the past year had homicide or sexual assault charges or convictions” and “another 2% of those taken into ICE custody were accused of being gang members.”

But Fox News viewers would’ve gotten the exact opposite impression.

• In April 2025, after the Trump administration sent more than 260 suspected immigrants to the brutal CECOT prison in El Salvador, Fox News implied that they were all “criminals” and “terrorists.” Host Jesse Watters accused his co-host Jessica Tarlov of “showing more sympathy to these illegal alien gangbangers than you showed to American citizens.” The reality was virtually the exact opposite; CBS News reported that, after analyzing “internal government documents listing their names and any known criminal information” and “cross referenc[ing] that with domestic and international court filings, news reports and arrest records,” it “could not find criminal records for 75% of the Venezuelans … now sitting in prison."
• In July 2025, Fox News went all in on denigrating the people held at a squalid Florida concentration camp known as “Alligator Alcatraz.” Host Sean Hannity called it “a detention camp for the worst of the worst illegal immigrants.” Anchor Harris Faulkner similarly said the site was for “the worst of the worst illegal immigrants." But as the Miami Herald reported, hundreds of the detainees — roughly one-third of the total population at the time — had no criminal convictions or pending charges, and of those who did, many were for low-level offenses.
• The numbers that summer were stark. In August 2025, “a Media Matters review of Fox News segments from June and July found that 80% of coverage about Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Department of Homeland Security operations claimed that Trump’s primary targets were criminals while only 14% acknowledged that ICE has been sweeping up noncriminal migrants."
• One segment that month featuring then-DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin illustrated how the network allowed the administration to spread its “worst of the worst” talking point, with McLaughlin misleadingly claiming: “Seventy percent of those illegal aliens who have been arrested under the Trump administration either have criminal convictions or pending criminal charges.” As noted above, the number of ICE detainees with violent criminal convictions is vanishingly small, and including pending — which is to say unproven — charges is nothing more than a way to juke the stats.
• Trump border czar and former Fox contributor Tom Homan took McLaughlin’s faux-stat and blew it even more out of proportion. He repeatedly claimed that “70% of the people we are arresting are criminals” and “the other 30% are national security threats.” Homan did not offer any support for his allegation that 30% of ICE arrestees are so-called “national security threats,” and none exists in the public domain.
• In January, roughly a month into the ICE and Border Patrol surge in Minnesota, Fox News figures continued to claim that Trump’s deportation forces were targeting hardened criminals. Faulkner said that “the president's goal” is to get the “violent worst of the worst out of the country first.” Host Ainsley Earhardt said: “ICE is trying to arrest violent criminals who are here illegally. And you have people and politicians and protesters that are trying to protect the worst offenders.” Guests sang from the same sheet music too; during an appearance on Fox & Friends, Alpha News journalist Liz Collin said ICE and Border Patrol are “are going after the worst of the worst.”
• McLaughlin’s misleading factoid did heavy lifting on Fox from the end of December 2025 through January 2026. A Media Matters study published on January 23 found that Fox News had repeated a “talking point about the supposed criminality of Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrestees at least 32 times since December 26, 2025, after a conservative outlet published internal government data claiming that 70% of people in ICE custody had ‘criminal histories.’"
• In January, as ICE marauded through Minneapolis, Fox News and others in right-wing media hyped what they initially characterized as a “shovel” attack against an ICE officer there. By mid-February, prosecutors dropped the charges and the case fell apart — but by then Fox had gotten their temporary use out of the story and moved on.
• In June, as protests raged outside an ICE detention center at Delaney Hall in New Jersey, Fox again misled their viewers about who was being detained there. Fox host Griff Jenkins said that a “majority" of detainees there “have had their day in court, they have had due process, they have final orders of removal." In fact, according to Syracuse University assistant professor Austin Kocher, 84% of people held there did not have a final order of removal. Fox host Will Cain said: “This idea that these people didn't commit a crime is simply absurd.” Again, data showed that 88% of people there had no criminal conviction.
• Fox News spent this summer spreading the same false narrative. From June 1 to September 13, Media Matters found that “out of 113 segments about ICE actions, 69% (78 segments) suggested that Trump's primary targets were immigrant criminals. Meanwhile, only 3 of the 113 segments acknowledged that ICE has been increasingly targeting primarily noncriminal immigrants."

Backlash to Trump’s maximalist approach in Spanish-language right-wing media

For as much as Fox News is trying to obfuscate the reality of Trump’s deportation operation, some voices in Spanish-language right-wing media see it clearly — and they’re not happy about it.

• At the end of 2025 and into the beginning of 2026, the popular Miami-based radio show Cada Tarde criticized Trump’s deportation operations. Host Carlos Acosta said: “The migration issue is being handled, as we have said on other occasions, by some people in this administration in such a way that is even racist."
• In March, Cada Tarde host Agustín Acosta said he hoped deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller — a top architect of Trump’s anti-immigrant policies — would “be fired soon.” Acosta called Miller and then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem “the co-architect[s] of this immigration debacle.”
• Agustín Acosta returned to the subject at the end of March, specifically criticizing Trump’s indiscriminate raids. “Some people are outraged that they were promised criminals, yet many of those taken into custody were hardworking people who were not criminals,” he said.
• In September, Oscar Ramirez said on Real America’s Voice Noticias that the Republican Party is “focusing too much on deporting, deporting, and deporting, but failing to support and celebrate those who have entered legally through the front door and achieved all this on their own merits.” Ramirez is a regular guest on Steve Bannon’s podcast on Real America’s Voice, where Bannon frequently calls for mass deportations.
• Also in September, a Cada Tarde guest lamented his previous support for Trump, specifically due to the president’s deportation policy towards Venezuelans in the United States. “It causes me enormous pain, enormous, to see what I'm seeing them do to the Latino community,” said Esteban Gerbasi. “I have solidarity with them, I want to it to be known that today I publicly say I regret having helped President Trump, because I never would have believed I would pay for that with what they are doing to Venezuelans who are asking for protection and asylum in this country and are persecuted as though they were criminals."

Fox News undercuts its own narrative

It’s worth underscoring that people convicted of crimes — even violent crimes — are still human beings who deserve basic dignity, a baseline many ICE facilities fail to meet. According to CNN, at least 58 people have died in ICE custody since the beginning of Trump’s second term. But for Fox News, immigrants who have been convicted of violent offenses are simply a convenient way to tar all immigrants as public safety risks.

For as much as Fox told its viewers Trump is going after “the worst of the worst,” the network’s own reporting now undermines that very narrative.