Working to crush the administration’s midterm chances, the media has been focusing their fire on Trump’s immigration policy. In line with previous unfair coverage from other leftist media outlets, this Thursday’s MS NOW Reports joined the anti-ICE bandwagon.
The MS NOW cast began with coverage of ICE’s traffic stop policy, before quickly shifting to a criticism of ICE detentions in general, citing mysterious numbers that imply the vast majority of ICE detainees are innocent. Former border patrol agent turned far-left activist Jenn Budd declared:
And as far as the president's comments about ‘we need to have these vehicle stops in order to get criminals off the street.’ For the last 18 months, the statistics have been clear that 95 percent of those being arrested in this mass deportation, in these raids have not committed a violent crime, 73 percent have not committed any crime whatsoever. So they are not taking criminals off the street. They're taking maybe a few.
MS NOW has activist Jenn Budd on their show to join the ICE hate. She brings up statistics from a misleading Cato Institute study that claims ICE is detaining innocent people. Unfortunately for them, looking at the data properly actually proves the exact opposite! pic.twitter.com/f8F8GIAUOZ
— James Waterman (@jwatermaniv) July 16, 2026
Budd doesn’t specify what source she’s citing to make this argument, but a little bit of digging reveals that these numbers come from the libertarian CATO Institute. The CATO Institute has been known to prop up misleading studies that favor their political agendas in the past. They ranked New Zealand, a country with official government censorship, as freer than the US. They also lumped illegal immigrants in with legal ones to pad their crime numbers.
Much like their previous work, the CATO study MS NOW cites here is also very misleading. Its two primary claims are that only 5 percent of ICE detainees had violent criminal convictions, and that 73% have no criminal convictions. On their own, these stats seem pretty damning for ICE, but a closer inspection reveals that the numbers are engineered to look bad.
While “no criminal convictions” makes it seem like 73 percent of ICE detainees are innocent, the truth is that the very same study contains, but fails to mention, the fact that around a third of these “innocent” detainees have pending criminal charges, meaning a majority of ICE detentions overall actually involve criminal charges, pending or convicted. That third of “innocent” detainees is also left out of the study’s “5 percent violent convictions” claim, meaning that number is also certainly higher.
The Transcript is Below. Click "view" to read.
MS NOW Reports
July 16, 2026
11:34:34 a.m. Eastern
ANTONIA HYLTON: You know, Jenn, it was interesting to see how pretty quickly DHS reversed course. They said they were going to halt their use of the traffic stops. And it seemed to be, in a way, almost a sort of accidental admission that perhaps these officers aren't properly trained. And then very quickly, we saw the president post online that, “no, we cannot give up one of ICE's most important and effective crime fighting tools,” he said, “the traffic stop.” What did that flip-flop tell you?
JENN BUDD: Well, that told me that, I mean, number one, when we look at ICE, specifically the agency of ICE, typically the way that they may have made their arrests in the past is they typically are arresting people who are being released from jail. So they have done a crime and they've done their time, and then immigration is notified and they come and pick them up. So they are not used to these types of stops.
At the same time, the fact that Homan comes out and says, “Oh, we need to pause and retrain,” it makes you- are you saying that you're putting agents out into the field with guns and teaching them how to do felony stops and not teaching them how to do basic everyday stops? And so what that says to me is that they possibly are not training them correctly.
And as far as the president's comments about “we need to have these vehicle stops in order to get criminals off the street.” For the last 18 months, the statistics have been clear that 95 percent of those being arrested in this mass deportation, in these raids have not committed a violent crime, 73 percent have not committed any crime whatsoever.
So they are not taking criminals off the street. They're taking maybe a few. But the risk that they are taking and the violence that they are dishing out does not equal to what their statistics are showing. So they're using aggressive use of force in instances in which they are not necessary. And it's not legal.
