Many news reports on immigration-enforcement actions bury key information about apprehended individuals so deep that it’s next to dinosaur bones.

F ew groups are as susceptible to trends as the press is.

And, boy, when reporters get on a trend, they commit.

For example: It’s a trend now that, whenever there’s a Democratic-related scandal, the news coverage tends to concentrate on the reaction to the scandal, often by accusing Democratic critics and the righteously aggrieved of “seizing” or “pouncing” on the issue. The scandal itself isn’t what the political press corps cares about; it’s that people have noticed.

How gauche it is for these people to criticize the scandal! How venal! How opportunistic! Etc.

This isn’t actual news reporting, by the way. This is called “public relations.”

Now that Donald Trump is in the White House for his second go-round, and his administration is beefing up its deportation efforts, there’s a fun new media trend in town. The trend is this: to report on ICE arrests and deportations in a way that causes maximum reputational damage to the federal agency, while also saying as little as possible (either up front or at all) about the reasons for the arrests and deportations.

It’s as nuts as it sounds!

Enjoy this headline from the Cincinnati Enquirer: “Cincinnati Children’s chaplain detained by ICE.”

Notably absent from the headline is mention of the fact that the former chaplain is an Egyptian national whose asylum status was revoked in December 2024 by the Biden administration. Also missing from the headline are mentions of the fact that the chaplain was flagged on the FBI’s terror watchlist during a background check, although the chaplain maintains that the fingerprints that led to his being flagged are not his. In the body of the story itself, it’s not until several paragraphs later that the reader learns the chaplain has filed multiple lawsuits against the federal government, most of which have been dismissed, except for one lawsuit that remains pending.

It’s possible the chaplain was flagged by mistake. It’s possible the Biden administration unfairly revoked his asylum status.

It’s also editorially indefensible for the Cincinnati Enquirer to omit these details from its headline. Editors instead chose to make it seem as if ICE officials had scooped up an Ohioan hospital chaplain, chucking him on a plane to God knows where.

Now, it’d be one thing if there were only one or two of these kinds of headlines, news blurbs, and ledes. However, there are far more than just a handful of these examples. This leads one to suspect that this isn’t merely a case of poor editorial judgment. The Enquirer headline and others like it suggest a larger, if unspoken, effort to underreport the seriousness of the charges against certain illegal immigrants and foreign nationals and to oversell their deportations, all in service of a larger narrative that says the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement efforts are sloppy, random, cruel, and haphazard.

Nowhere is this apparent attempt at obfuscation and partisan advocacy clearer than in the press’s psychotic insistence on referring to foreign nationals and illegal immigrants by the states in which they are apprehended. We’ve seen the term “Indiana man” used to describe an undocumented 43-year-old Mexican national who was arrested in St. Joseph County, Ind. We’ve seen “Athens man” used to describe the Venezuelan national who murdered University of Georgia student Laken Riley.

It sometimes gets more granular — and more blatantly misleading — than just state affiliation. We’ve even seen the term “Ice Cream Man” used to refer to a 71-year-old Lebanese national who was deported to Beirut from Michigan for alleged war crimes. Thankfully, some newsrooms made sure to include upfront that the man stands accused of torturing and killing two Irish soldiers in the 1980s. But “ice cream man”?

We’ve seen “Harvard researcher” used to describe a Russian national who was caught smuggling undeclared petri dishes into the United States. U.S. immigration officials claim they found messages on the Russian woman’s phone indicating she planned to smuggle the materials and had taken deliberate steps to evade detection. We’ve seen the term “Georgetown scholar” used to refer to an Indian national whose father-in-law is a former high-ranking Hamas official.

We have stories with headlines such as, “DACA recipient who came to U.S. when he was 4 years old deported,” that will wait dozens of paragraphs before mentioning the deportee had been “ordered removed in absentia” last June, during the Biden administration. We also must wait several paragraphs to learn that the advance parole document was “issued in error,” according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. We also have stories with headlines such as, “Veteran who has been in U.S. since he was 4 years old faces deportation,” that wait a whopping 17 paragraphs before dropping this information on the reader: In 2008, the veteran “opened fire on a house party crowd in Colorado Springs, striking a 19-year-old, who was five months pregnant at the time, in the leg.”

Then, of course, there’s the infamous Salvadoran national Kilmar Abrego Garcia — or, as U.S. media like to call him, the “Maryland man.”

We’ve been buried under a mountain of headlines that include, “Outrage grows over Maryland man’s mistaken deportation to El Salvador prison,” “U.S. Renews Opposition to Bringing Back Maryland Man Wrongly Deported to El Salvador,” and “Bukele rejects returning Maryland man Trump officials mistakenly deported.”

No one can be blamed for believing initially that the Trump administration had wrongly arrested and deported a U.S. citizen. But Garcia is not a U.S. citizen. He’s not a “Maryland man.” He is a Salvadoran national who has been living in the United States illegally since 2011, most recently residing in the state of Maryland.

These deportation cases are complex enough as they are, and there are strong legal arguments for and against the Trump administration’s efforts.

But it helps no one to obscure the facts of the matter by downplaying alleged criminal offenses and legal statuses, and all while offhandedly referring to illegal immigrants and foreign nationals by the names of U.S. states and universities.

Then again, perhaps muddying the point is the point.