ProPublica hit back at the Department of Homeland Security this week after the agency branded its recent report on ICE detaining American citizens as “fake news.”

On Thursday, the investigative outlet published a bombshell headline that read, “We Found That More Than 170 U.S. Citizens Have Been Held by Immigration Agents. They’ve Been Kicked, Dragged and Detained for Days.” The in-depth report chronicled the detentions in an effort to create an official count and cites police documents, testimonials, and video footage.

DHS attacked the story on social media Thursday evening, accusing ProPublica of “wasting more ink with disgusting smears against our brave @ICEgov law enforcement, as they are facing more than a 1000% increase in assaults against them.” The post added:

We have said it a million times: DHS enforcement operations are HIGHLY TARGETED and are not resulting in the arrest of U.S. citizens. We do our due diligence. We know who we are targeting ahead of time. If and when we do encounter individuals subject to arrest, our law enforcement is trained to ask a series of well-determined questions to determine status and removability.

What makes someone a target for immigration enforcement is if they are ILLEGALLY in the U.S.—NOT their skin color, race, or ethnicity.
The Biden administration tore open our borders and allowed dangerous criminal illegal alien rapists, gang members, and murderers to overwhelm American cities.

President Trump and @Sec_Noem will continue to remove vicious criminals from our homeland.

ProPublica hit back with a post of its own, saying, “We stand by our reporting.” The outlet shared a link to the article and added, “It relies on footage that anyone can watch for themselves. We also explain exactly how we did it.”

The article included a section with the title, “How We Did This.” ProPublica’s explanation of its methods in reporting the story began by noting, “Americans have reported a wide range of troubling encounters with immigration agents. To get a wider sense of agents’ conduct, we cataloged all incidents we could find of citizens being held against their will by immigration officers.”

“Critically, there is no way to know the complete scope of these stops since the government itself does not track them. But we were still able to fill in the picture a bit more,” the explanation continued, adding:

We reviewed more than 170 cases overall, which we sorted into two categories.

The first is Americans who were held because agents questioned their citizenship. We found more than 50 such cases. The second category is Americans arrested by immigration agents after being accused of assaulting or impeding officers at protests or during immigration arrests of others. In that category, we tallied about 130 Americans, including more than a dozen elected officials. In many of these cases, the government never charged these individuals or the cases were dismissed.

Read the full article here.

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