‘Disgusting smears like these…are leading to a 1000% increase in assaults against our brave law enforcement,’ a DHS spokeswoman said.
NBC News was forced to issue a correction to its reporting that Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents held a young autistic girl captive in order to pressure her illegal immigrant father to surrender to authorities, after the Department of Homeland Security clarified that the man actually abandoned his daughter while fleeing agents.
“ICE held 5-year-old autistic girl in Massachusetts to pressure father to surrender, family says,” read a headline from the outlet earlier this week.
“The girl’s father, Edward Hip, has lived in the United States for the last 22 years, according to his wife,” a subheading added.
The story accused agents of holding the girl outside her Massachusetts home “to pressure her father to surrender to authorities.”
“A video of the incident, obtained by Telemundo Nueva Inglaterra, shows a young girl surrounded by what appears to be several male law enforcement agents outside of her home in Leominster, Massachusetts, last Tuesday,” the story explained.
“The girl is sitting beside what appears to be a law enforcement SUV and holding a bottle while encircled by the several men, according to the video,” it added.
In the video, the girl’s mother says, “They took my daughter, she’s 5-years-old. She has autism spectrum. Give me my daughter back.”
The woman told Telemundo that her husband called her while he was driving with their daughter shortly before the incident and told her he thought he was being followed. Edward Hip Mejia drove home and “managed to run back into the parking lot of my house, but they grabbed” their daughter, she claimed.
But now NBC has been left to issue a correction after Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin clarified that Mejia had actually “ignored law enforcement emergency lights to pull over and drove back to his house. He fled from the car, gave officers the double middle finger, and darted inside his house. He abandoned his 5-year-old daughter in the car. Officers helped rescue the child and called local police to report the abandonment.”
McLaughlin also said the man has previous arrests for domestic abuse and strangulation, details that are not included in NBC’s reporting.
Now, NBC’s headline reads: “Video shows ICE with 5-year-old girl while agents attempt to arrest her father.”
“The Department of Homeland Security said the father ignored directions to pull over and ‘abandoned’ his daughter,” the subheading adds.
A correction on the article says, “An earlier version of this article mischaracterized the activities of ICE agents in the video. The article has been updated.”
The correction comes as McLaughlin has warned that inflammatory rhetoric and misinformation has led to increased danger for ICE agents as they carry out their duties. Earlier this week, a man carried out a “targeted attack” on a Dallas, Texas, ICE facility seeking to cause “real terror” among agents. The gunman shot at an unmarked transport van driven by an ATF agent on Wednesday, killing one detainee and injuring two others. Authorities found shell casings with anti-ICE messages engraved on them at the scene.
“Disgusting smears like these peddled by the media are leading to a 1000% increase in assaults against our brave law enforcement,” McLaughlin said of the NBC report.
The rise in violence comes as Democratic lawmakers and pundits falsely accuse the Trump administration of “disappearing people,” unfairly targeting “brown” people, and putting illegal immigrants into “concentration camps.”