Propaganda Press Caught Again Telling ICE Lies

Aliya Rahman says she feels “lucky to be alive,” that the days since federal law enforcement officials dragged her out of her car have been “traumatizing and overwhelming.” 

Corporate media outlets will tell you that, too. All of them. The same story, the same narrative. The “disabled woman” was just trying to get to her doctor’s appointment, they report, pushing the left’s message that Rahman is another victim of President Donald Trump’s Immigration & Customs Enforcement agents and their roundup of poor “undocumented” immigrants.

What they won’t tell you — at least not until deep into the story — is that Rahman, according to the Department of Homeland Security, was arrested for obstruction after she “ignored multiple commands by an officer to move her vehicle away from the scene.” Because she failed to do so, a DHS official told The Federalist, Rahman was arrested for obstruction.

The accomplice media made sure to emphasize Rahman’s claims that she was “brought to a detention center where she was denied medical care and lost consciousness.” They haven’t been all that interested in finding out her full resume, as The New York Post did, reporting that the woman screaming on the viral video, is a “tech guru and LGBT and racial justice activist [including a decade-long history with Black Lives Matter] who describes herself as a ‘friendly neighborhood deniable asset.’”

By the way, a DHS official tells The Federalist that Rahman’s claim that she was denied medial care is false. 

In the chaotic scene caught on video, in which ICE officers are attempting to arrest four illegal aliens, a mob of protesters surrounds them, screaming hate-filled obscenities. Horns blare. Officers are trying to do their jobs under constant assault and obstruction a week after the fatal shooting of Renee Good, the radical ICE “watcher” who appears to have struck a federal agent with the vehicle she was driving, now the symbol of the left’s insurrection against the federal government. The Minneapolis tinder box was then — and continues to be — on the edge of conflagration. 

“As officers carried out their law enforcement duties, a significant crowd surrounded them and began impeding law enforcement operations— a federal crime,” a DHS official said in an email to The Federalist. “One agitator ignored multiple commands by an officer to move her vehicle away from the scene, she was arrested for obstruction. Another agitator assaulted an officer by jumping on his back. Six of these agitators were taken into custody for assaulting law enforcement.”

‘ICE did NOT’

Corporate media outlets have covered the Minneapolis ICE story like they’ve covered much of Homeland Security’s efforts to secure the homeland: dishonestly. 

Case in point, the story that immigration enforcement officers arrested four members of the Oglala Sioux Tribe and that the Trump administration demanded an “immigration agreement” from tribal officials in exchange for information on where the four were being detained. 

“We have not been able to verify any claims that DHS law enforcement arrested or even encountered members of the Oglala Sioux Tribe,” a DHS wrote in an email to The Federalist. 

“Additionally, we have not uncovered any claims by individuals in our detention centers that they are members of the Oglala Sioux tribe.” 

Furthermore, “ICE did NOT ask the tribe for any kind of agreement, we have simply asked for basic information on the individuals, such as names and date of birth so that we can run a proper check to provide them with the facts,” the DHS official said.

But that’s not how the not-so-independent Independent painted the picture in a story headlined, “ICE is sweeping up Native Americans in Minnesota arrests, tribal leaders say: ‘Our citizenship is not negotiable.’”

A funny thing happened on the way to the truth. An official form the Oglala Sioux Tribe is now walking back the tribe’s claims. Tribal President Frank Star Comes Out (Yes, that is his name), wrote in a memo on Thursday that his earlier assertion had been “misinterpreted” and that the Trump administration did not demand an agreement, the Associated Press reported on Sunday. 

“He said the tribe had been in ‘cooperative communications’ with federal officials about the issue and that federal officials had said that ‘one option for the Tribe to have easier access to information is to enter into an immigration agreement’ with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and DHS. He did not specify what type of agreement,” the AP reported. 

Interestingly, Star Comes Out had not responded to any of the wire service’s “repeated requests for comment.” Yet, the AP spent much of the story repeating allegations from members of other tribes about ICE stopping and detaining tribal citizens. The story also highlights “some” Native American tribes are rethinking their contracts with Homeland Security. 

“In Alaska, Indigenous shareholders penned an op-ed in the Anchorage Daily News advocating that the Bering Straits Native Corporation — owned by thousands of Native American shareholders in Alaska — divest from all immigration detention centers across the country,” the leftist news outlet reported.

Such is the state of today’s corporate media, the true disinformation peddlers. The Federalist has tracked the propaganda press’ lies about immigration law enforcement over the first year of Trump 2.0. Read the media’s many falsehoods here.

Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.