NBC Nightly News continues their staunch immigration advocacy. Tonight’s item rehashes prior reporting, centering on the ICE-detained Weed Whacker Man.
Watch the report in its entirety, as aired on NBC Nightly News on Thursday, June 26th,. 2025:
TOM LLAMAS: Now to the immigration raids being carried out all across the country by federal agents. And tonight, we have new NBC News reporting on who is being rounded up. Here’s Jacob Soboroff.
JACOB SOBOROFF: In southern California, dramatic videos show federal agents detaining day laborers in Home Depot parking lots and chasing farm workers across fields.
ONLOOKER: What you’re doing is kidnapping!
SOBOROFF: This street vendor clung to a tree as agents tried to bring her into custody. According to the Department of Homeland Security, more than 1600 people have been taken into custody in L.A. alone in the last three weeks. An all-out blitz promised by Border Czar Tom Homan at the start of the raids.
SOBOROFF: Are there more days coming ahead?
TOM HOMAN: Absolutely. We're going to be out there every day.
SOBOROFF: President Trump reiterating today he wants to deport a million undocumented immigrants a year.
DONALD TRUMP: What we’re really doing is we're really going after the criminal aliens, of which we have plenty to work with.
SOBOROFF: But according to new ICE data obtained by NBC News, 120,000 out of the 185,000 immigrants arrested by ICE since October have committed no serious crimes.
ONLOOKER SHOUTING (IN SPANISH): Hey, why do you hit him?
SOBOROFF: Alejandro Barranco says that includes his father Narciso, an undocumented landscaper who was cutting bushes at an I-Hop when he was pinned to the ground by federal agents last weekend. DHS says he tried to assault the agents with a weed whacker, a claim Alejandro refutes.
You served in Afghanistan. What would have happened if you would have treated a detainee that way in the Marines?
ALEJANDRO BARRANCO: I promise you, it would have been a war crime and the situation would have been completely different.
SOBOROFF: DHS said its officers use the minimum amount of force in detaining Barranco.
If President Trump is watching, what do you want to say to him?
BARRANCO: I want President Trump to know that not all the- all these undocumented people are bad. Most of them are here, hard working people.
SOBOROFF: Tom- late today, DHS has released a list of criminals they say have been arrested under this operation in L.A., but our reporting indicates it was only 6% of undocumented immigrants who have been known to have been convicted of a homicide who have been detained since October.
LLAMAS: All right, Jacob Soboroff. Great to see you in studio. We thank you.
There’s a lot of talking going on in these two minutes, but what is actually being said? Mostly that there are raids, people are being detained, some of which have allegedly committed “no serious crimes” while in the United States- aside from entering into the country illegally.
The whole purpose of the report seems to re-center Weed Whacker Man, and perhaps re-establish him as the immigration martyr du jour. This, of course, is probably why NBC aired no footage of the man as he brandished a weed whacker at ICE agents attempting to carry out the arrest.
This time, though, a new and offensive twist: Soboroff interviewing Weed Whacker Man’s son and comparing the detention of an enemy combatant in Afghanistan to ICE detentions in Los Angeles. No comparison or analogy too shameless in furtherance of a narrative.