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Last week, reporters at Denver’s 9News started hearing that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers were staging military-style vehicles in parking lots across the city. The Denver area is home to a significant population of immigrants; last year, the suburb of Aurora became a focal point for Donald Trump’s reelection campaign, when false claims spread that an apartment complex had been taken over by a Venezuelan gang. Shortly before Election Day, Trump visited Aurora, promising that he would “rescue” it with immigration raids that would happen “very, very fast.” Now the moment seemed to have come.
Chris Vanderveen, 9News’s director of special projects, quickly dispatched teams of reporters to pursue the leads. “One crew said, ‘I think I’m going to follow the vehicles, and see where they go,’” Vanderveen explained. “I said, ‘Great. Do not get in the way.’” On Wednesday, ICE officials claimed to have “targeted” more than a hundred “violent Venezuelan gang” members for arrest and detention. 9News journalists confirmed that raids took place at several apartment buildings and a mobile home community, but reported that the number of people who were taken into custody was much lower. (ICE officials later acknowledged that they had detained only about thirty people, just one of whom was identified as a gang member.)
The next day, Vanderveen was surprised to see Tom Homan, the White House “border czar,” blame the limited number of arrests on the fact that news of the raids had publicly leaked. “We’re not going to tolerate it anymore,” Homan told Fox News. “This is not a game.” Homan later indicated that ICE might restrict how much access reporters had to officials during future raids.
On social media, supporters of the Trump administration’s stance against immigrants have exploded with outrage over leaks about ICE operations that have supposedly spread across the country. Much of the consternation has been directed at government officials thought to be trying to undermine Trump’s policies: “The FBI is so corrupt,” Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, recently posted on X. But local news outlets have also found themselves in the crosshairs. Last week, Brendan Carr, the new chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, pledged to launch an investigation into KCBS, a California radio station that reported on an ongoing ICE raid. “You had ICE agents undercover doing operations in East San Jose, part of the town known for violent gang activity, and you had this radio station broadcasting the live location, identifying the unmarked vehicles that they were in,” Carr told Fox News. “This is really concerning.” The FCC is reportedly reviewing whether KCBS violated the terms of its license, which require that it report on matters in the “public interest.”
Fox News’s Bill Melugin, who embedded with ICE during the Denver operation, reported after the raids that “there had been media leaks, media articles written that this entire operation was coming—and when we were with them, within the first couple hours, it seemed every property they went to was either vacant or the targets they were after simply weren’t there.” Over the weekend, he noted in a post on X that the “leaks keep coming,” pointing to an article in the Los Angeles Times that revealed plans for a major upcoming operation. “It is extremely dangerous for ICE officers to have their plans leaked & for their targets to know they are coming,” he wrote. (Hector Becerra, the managing editor of the Times, denied that the coverage had revealed any important details. “The Times, like many news organizations, reports on law enforcement activities that are in the public interest on a daily basis,” he said. “We carefully consider how, or if, there is any credible danger to be caused by our reporting.”) In the footage that Fox released of the Denver raids, the faces of law enforcement officers at the scene were blurred out.
The condemnation of unauthorized journalism about ICE operations echoes that of the US military. “What we’re seeing is an agency trying to silence unembedded reporting,” Azmat Khan, a Pulitzer Prize–winning war correspondent and Columbia Journalism School professor, observed. 9News’s Vanderveen scoffed at the idea that the reporters covering raids are privy to sensitive information. “There was no leak necessary to figure this one out,” he said, of the operation in Denver. “The worst-kept secret in the world is when you put a bunch of vehicles and personnel dressed in fatigues in shopping-center parking lots.”
That may have been the point: the ICE raids are a show of force, part of a campaign by the Trump administration to demonstrate the use of aggressive tactics to remove people who officials claim are violent and dangerous. In Denver, at least, that wasn’t how things turned out. “It couldn’t have possibly gone wrong because we were obvious with what we were doing,” Vanderveen said, of how those in charge appear to be seeing things. “It had to be the press.”
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