BIAS ON ICE: How the PBS News Hour Favored the Pro-Illegal Immigrant Mob in Minneapolis

Clay Waters
March 11th, 2026 1:30 PM

Text to Speech

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Last December, after revelations of massive fraud in Somali community in Minneapolis, President Trump sent U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers into Minneapolis for “Operation Metro Surge,” arresting illegal immigrants with criminal records, displeasing the pro-amnesty press and far-left activist mobs.

Media ire flamed up January 7, 2026 after an ICE officer fatally shot Renee Good in her car as she interfered in an immigration enforcement operation. After giving her an order to get out of the car, which she failed to obey, she started driving toward an ICE agent, and he opened fire in self-defense.

Between January 7, the day of the shooting, and February 13, when President Trump’s border czar Tom Homan announced the drawdown of ICE agents from Minneapolis, PBS News Hour coverage slanted extremely against ICE, with stories dominated by sympathetic accounts of anti-ICE street mobs, while mob attacks on officers and civilians were downplayed or ignored.

KEY FINDINGS:

■ PBS devoted 95 minutes and 34 seconds of coverage to Trump’s immigration operation in Minneapolis.

■ PBS’s coverage turned out 85% negative, 15% positive. When sound bites were taken out, the numbers shifted to 90% negative vs. 10% positive.

■ Of 34 total guest appearances, 28 voiced negative opinions on ICE, with 3 guests rated positive and 3 neutral, a negative/positive ratio of over 9:1.

■ PBS journalists asked those guests 63 questions from the anti-ICE perspective, with 4 questions positive and 44 neutral, a negative/positive ratio of nearly 16:1.

Throughout the Minneapolis operation, PBS News Hour leaned heavily on a selection of facts and assumptions to skew against ICE, while ignoring other inconvenient facts – starting with the fact that shooting victim Renee Good, a radicalized mother of a toddler, showed up solely to block legal immigration enforcement action.

Coverage of the confrontations between ICE and mobs of local activists was led by a PBS correspondent already planted there, Minnesota-based special correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro. From his January 8 take on the Good shooting:

Fred de Sam Lazaro: A vigil and a makeshift memorial grew Wednesday evening near the site of the shooting, honoring Good, whose family and friends describe her as a Christian who participated in mission trips, a poet who loved to sing, and a loving mother of three. At the memorial today, where protesters have put up makeshift barricades, Somali immigrant Deqa Adan came to pay her respects.

As that excerpt suggests, de Sam Lazaro emotionally indulged local leftist activists, as if providing counseling to the mobs encouraged by the irresponsible, sometimes incendiary rhetoric of local Democratic political leaders, such as Gov. Walz’s offensive Anne Frank comparison at a January 25 press conference: "We have got children in Minnesota hiding in their houses, afraid to go outside. Many of us grew up reading that story of Anne Frank. Somebody's going to write that children's story about Minnesota."

That odious comparison was subsequently condemned by the U.S. Holocaust museum. Yet it was not mentioned on the News Hour.

Overall, the News Hour’s ICE-in-Minneapolis coverage turned out 85.3% negative, 14.7% positive. When sound bites were removed from the tally, the numbers shifted to 89.8% negative vs 10.2% positive.

 

UNDERSERVED STORIES

An anti-ICE mob invaded the Cities Church in nearby St. Paul on Sunday January 18, on the assumption that a church pastor was affiliated with ICE. The hostile takeover of the house of worship was assisted and documented by former CNN journalist Don Lemon. The News Hour devoted a mere 15 seconds to the incident on its January 19 episode without Lemon’s name being used. The group shouted at churchgoers despite being asked to leave by the pastor. The disruption ended the service. 

Lemon was later charged with a violation of the FACE Act, which guarantees access to places of religious worship, and was subsequently indicted by a grand jury. His arrest drew News Hour coverage January 30, with de Sam Lazaro portraying Lemon as a First Amendment hero. The story appeared online under the heading “Arrests of journalists fuel backlash as anti-ICE protests spread from Minneapolis.”

De Sam Lazaro: ….Federal agents today arrested former CNN anchor Don Lemon and three others in connection with a January 18 protest at a church in St. Paul where an ICE official serves as a pastor. Lemon, who was fired from CNN in 2023, now hosts an independent show on YouTube. The Justice Department has charged Lemon with federal civil rights crimes. The National Association of Black Journalists, along with other news organizations, have condemned the move.

Don Lemon, Former CNN Anchor [voiceover recording]: We’re here just chronicling and reporting. We`re not part of the activists, but we’re here just reporting on them.

De Sam Lazaro: Lemon’s lawyer says he was there strictly in a journalistic role.

Lemon [recording]: So this is what the First Amendment is about, about the freedom to protest.

*

On January 25, an anti-ICE mob broke windows and scrawled anti-ICE graffiti on the side of a Home2Suites by Hilton hotel for supposedly hosting ICE agents. The vandalism earned 17 seconds the next day from de Sam Lazaro: “...one demonstration boiled over last night, with people vandalizing the hotel where they believed ICE agents were staying. The state’s Department of Public Safety said officials were encircling the group for arrests when federal agents showed up unannounced and deployed chemical irritants, all this as friends and colleagues mourn and remember Alex Pretti.”

*

A violent protest on February 7 outside the Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis was ignored completely by PBS, save for three seconds during an unrelated February 12 report showing a still photo of the building’s entrance sign, with “Employees Only” crossed out with white spray paint and replaced with “Pigs.”

In that segment, De Sam Lazaro laid on the sentiment while reporting from the makeshift memorial to Renee Good. Co-anchor Amna Nawaz parroted Gov. Walz when she asked the reporter: “[Walz] talked about the generational trauma from the ICE raids. Mayor Frey said too that the raids had been catastrophic for these communities. So how do people on the ground begin to heal?”

PBS also forwarded misinformation helpful to liberals. Aliya Rahman, the famously “disabled,” self-identified autistic protester dragged from her car by ICE, was offered an extended unchallenged rant in a February 13 segment. Reporter Lisa Desjardins assured viewers that Rahman was not an agitator, telling substitute anchor William Brangham “Some of the statements [Department of Homeland Security] sent us is contrary to the evidence that we have seen. For example, the agency referred to Aliya Rahman as an agitator. We know she was on her way to work. There’s no other evidence about her.”

Actually, there is plenty of evidence about her. Rahman has a long career as a professional liberal activist working with far-left organizations that promote “racial,” “criminal,” and “social justice,” including the Center for Community Change, Equality Ohio, and Code for Progress.

 

ANTI-ICE GUESTS

News Hour anchors threw resistance-friendly questions to show guests who were almost invariably anti-ICE and anti-Trump. Twenty-eight News Hour guests voiced negative opinions on ICE, compared to just three guests that offered pro-ICE positions and three neutral guests. PBS anchors posted 63 questions from the anti-ICE perspective to those guests, compared to just four positive ones, while 44 were neutral.

Here is a January 15 question to Elizabeth Goitein of the unlabeled left-wing law group Brennan Center for Justice in a discussion about Trump possibly invoking the Insurrection Act in Minneapolis:

Co-anchor Geoff Bennett: And that plays into what critics argue -- that the deployment of these ICE agents to Minneapolis and the protests it sparked, that this was all just a test case to justify invoking the Insurrection Act and potentially deploying the military to Democratic-led cities in this election year, that was the plan all along, that immigration enforcement was really just a pretext, to which you would say what?

On January 27, Bennett talked to law professor Claire Finkelstein and found ominous portents in her “U.S. civil war simulation.”

Bennett: And you have said that ICE is acting in ways that even exceed what was imagined in your simulations. What stands out to you?

Claire Finkelstein: We did not have federal agents or federal troops openly defying the law, firing on protesters, and, frankly, killing them in cold blood.

On January 28, Bennett talked to Cardinal Joseph Tobin about his interfaith sermon calling for the defunding of ICE: "In your message, you also invoked the rise of authoritarianism. Do you believe the country is headed in that direction or that we're presently there? And, if so, what are the biggest moral choices facing Americans right now?"

After all the incendiary Democratic rhetoric News Hour reporters and anchors drew out of the Minneapolis anti-ICE resistance, Bennett nervily claimed on February 6, during the show’s Friday political roundtable discussion, that “Democrats aren’t as tactically ruthless on the things that they say they care about as compared to Republicans,” because the Democrats allegedly “folded on their demand that ICE agents not wear masks.”

 

JOURNALISM OR PRO-MOB THERAPY?

On January 14, News Hour White House correspondent Liz Landers demanded White House border czar Tom Homan explain the Department of Homeland Security detaining agitators obstructing ICE removal proceeding, including a woman dragged from her car after ignoring commands to move her vehicle. (The woman turned out to be Aliya Rahman, featured by the News Hour February 13.)

Liz Landers: There are Americans who see this and say this looks like Putin’s Russia. What is your response to that?

Homan responded with a point rarely raised on PBS – lack of cooperation from the locals was hindering ICE’s actions: "You know, if they would let us in their damn jail and stop being a sanctuary city, we could arrest the bad guy in the safety and security of a jail. But because they normally release them, now we got to go in the community and find them. Then they`re mad we’re in the community."

On January 29, the killing of Alex Pretti moved co-anchor Bennett to describe a vigil for Pretti as “Solemn calls for justice in a city still very much on edge.”

Perhaps the worst individual story ran on February 9, concerning the mental health suffering of Minneapolis residents, a segment that confused therapy with journalism. A brief sample of the over seven-minute story:

 

Amna Nawaz: ….as special correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro reports, the crackdown has impacted nearly every aspect of daily life, including many residents` health.

De Sam Lazaro: This is a new routine for Viviana Salazar... filling boxes at a Minneapolis food pantry for families now too afraid to leave their homes. For weeks, networks of volunteers have sprung up across the Twin Cities to bring supplies to community members who fear that even venturing to a grocery store could lead to their arrest….

Viviana Salazar: I received a message from a teacher saying my student had a glass of water for dinner. So that to me was heartbreaking.

De Sam Lazaro: The fear that is forcing people to shut themselves in extends far beyond just grocery shopping. Children are not being sent to school. Adults are not going to work, complicating the challenge of paying the rent. And entire families are putting off going to the doctor.

 

PRO-ICE COVERAGE RARE

Even the positive points of PBS’s coverage were quickly neutralized. While the News Hour mostly ignored fiery anti-ICE mob rhetoric, it did run a soundbite from the February 10 House hearing on ICE from Todd Lyons, who spoke of an agent having his finger bitten off – an act of violence which reporter Desjardins proceeded to blame on ICE.

After Lyons asserted “One officer in Minnesota had his finger bitten off by a protester egged on by elected officials characterizing our officers as Gestapo or secret police,” Desjardins got defensive: “But Democrats insisted that’s the effect, not the cause, that immigration officials are making things unsafe.”

*

Bennett asked Kaohly Her, mayor of St. Paul, a polite “pro-ICE” question on January 21 regarding the mob invasion of a local church: “I also want to ask you about this incident in St. Paul where protesters disrupted a church service where one of the pastors is an ICE official. At this moment, when tensions are already high, do you believe entering a house of worship during a service is an acceptable form of protest or does that cross a line?”

METHODOLOGY:

MRC analysts tallied every statement dealing with immigration enforcement in Minneapolis/St. Paul made by PBS journalists on the News Hour between January 7-February 13, 2026 (28 episodes). Analysts evaluated coverage as positive, negative, or neutral toward the issue. Guests who discussed the immigration issue were evaluated in similar fashion, as were the questions to them posed by PBS journalists. Not included: general comments about the congressional fight over federal ICE funding, or controversies involving ICE in states besides Minnesota.

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