Right-wing media silos leave MAGA flailing on ICE

The Trump administration has thoroughly failed the conservative information ecosystem credited with elevating Donald Trump back into the White House. Right-wing media wanted pictures of dangerous criminals being arrested for mass deportation by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Instead, they’ve gotten images of toddlers detained, a 37-year-old mother shot dead, an elderly grandfather dragged from his home and minor U.S. citizens injured and in trauma units. A now-infamous story of Liam Conejo Ramos, a five-year-old in Minneapolis taken by ICE on Tuesday, is the perfect illustration of how fractured the media landscape has become in the age of Trump — and how the right’s hermetically sealed system is now undermining the administration’s deportation policies. 

To many Americans, the viral image of a child swept up in an enforcement dragnet is horrifying. Yet in the right-wing media silo, the reaction — if there has been any at all — is not concern but suspicion. Conservative outlets have insisted the story is a lie and are clearly exasperated by the widespread coverage of the child’s after-school arrest and transfer to a detention center over 1,300 miles away in Texas.

The most revealing aspect of the right’s current meltdown over anti-ICE protests is their confusion. MAGA world is flailing and sputtering, trapped inside a media ecosystem that no longer reaches reality. The result is a whack-a-mole defense of ICE that keeps collapsing under the weight of evidence, public outrage and even the testimony of people the right used to trust: cops.

That’s how impermeable the right’s narrative borders have become. When off-duty cops in Minneapolis revealed this week that ICE agents are stopping and handcuffing them, and even pointing guns at them, MAGA simply shrugged. Fox News made only passing mention. When the Minnesota Department of Corrections took the extraordinary step of releasing surveillance footage to accuse the Department of Homeland Security of spreading misinformation, falsely claiming to have arrested people during “operations” when they were actually transferred from state custody, right-wing media did not cover it. 

Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s lies have morphed beyond routine bureaucratic spin into wild, easily refutable fabrications. When DHS posted that one of their targets was “at large” and dangerous after they had smashed down doors and dragged a U.S. citizen into the snow half-naked, local journalists located the actual suspect in state prison within minutes using a public database. When immigration officers pepper-sprayed a vehicle with children inside as a family drove home from a basketball game, DHS posted on social media: “It is horrific to see radical agitators bring children to violent riots” before deleting the post.

When they dragged Aliya Rahman, a U.S. citizen recorded telling agents she is autistic with a traumatic brain injury, from her car on the way to a medical appointment, a DHS spokesperson called her an agitator obstructing immigration operations. And in perhaps the most Orwellian moment yet, the White House posted a photo showing a protester, Nekima Levy Armstrong, sobbing with tears streaming down her face. But the image had been digitally altered — in the original, Armstrong appeared stoic and determined — and appeared to be designed to humiliate her before trial. When called out, the administration warned that the memes would continue.

How can anyone trust evidence produced by people who openly brag about their digital deceptions? Conservative influencers are nevertheless trying to explain away images of federal agents in masks pepper-spraying protesters in the face while pinning them to frozen pavement. Minneapolis has exposed something the right-wing media apparatus can’t spin away — and now their carefully constructed alternate universe is collapsing around them.

The administration’s credibility is shot. Border Patrol Chief Greg Bovino claimed on Tuesday that “everything we do every day is legal, ethical, moral, well-grounded in law.” But ICE’s own training documents contradict that. A whistleblower revealed this week that agents are now entering homes without judicial warrants, using only administrative warrants they sign themselves. 

To be certain, there is a faction of Americans who want desperately to support Trump’s consolidation of power, and they have latched onto immigration because they believe — correctly, until recently — that it’s his strongest issue. The president himself sees immigration as the key to his political success; his election proves that White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller’s brand of brutality works. 

But when you campaign on a promise of an unprecedented mass deportation, you eventually have to carry it out. And the brutality of executing it — masked agents, warrantless home raids and pepper spraying babies — is proving politically unbearable.

“So the story is that ICE detained a five-year-old. Well, what are they supposed to do?” Vice President JD Vance asked on Thursday as he was flanked by ICE and Border Patrol officers in Minneapolis. 

Allie Beth Stuckey, a conservative Christian influencer who has called empathy “toxic,” dismissed protesters’ concerns about ICE’s brutality. “On Instagram, it’s 2020 all over again,”  she wrote on X. “Women, including many, many Christian women, are being completely duped by the anti-ICE propaganda. Believed the ‘ICE arrested a lone 5-year-old’ completely. It’s demoralizing. I am working HARD in my DMs and posts and on my show trying to combat this nonsense and appeal to these women.”

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The Trump administration made a catastrophic miscalculation: They thought they could control the narrative through sheer force of lying. Now the cracks are showing everywhere. The great irony is that Trump’s 2024 achievement — expanding the Republican coalition — is being destroyed by his signature campaign promise of mass deportation executed with maximum cruelty.

The killing of Renee Nicole Good first exposed this fault line. In the immediate aftermath of her death, the Trump administration adopted an absolutist, no-apologies posture that was chilling even by American policing standards. Typically, when law enforcement kills a civilian, there is at least a ritual performance of solemnity: condolences and promises of an impartial investigation, along with an acknowledgment, however hollow, that taking a human life is a grave matter. 

In this case, the administration rushed to declare the shooting justified and beyond reproach. Trump himself baselessly accused Good of trying to run over an ICE agent. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem labeled Good’s actions “domestic terrorism.” There was no remorse, no empathy for the family she left behind, no suggestion that the state should be held to account. The vice president stood at the White House podium and declared that the agent who shot her, Jonathan Ross, was protected by absolute immunity. Two weeks later, Vance claimed he never said it. 

Trump himself awkwardly admitted during a rambling press briefing on Tuesday that ICE “is going to make a mistake sometimes” and said “We feel terribly” — a remarkable retreat from the administration’s chest-thumping earlier this month. But even this admission appears to be strategic, a softening of their rhetoric while maintaining the same brutal enforcement, all the while hoping Americans won’t notice the contradiction.

On Thursday night’s episode of CNN’s “NewsNight,” Jim Schultz, a former White House Trump attorney, conceded as much. “I think Republicans are losing the argument here because of the way it’s being conducted in the streets,” he said. “No doubt about it.”

The right built an impenetrable information fortress precisely to avoid moments like this. Conservative influencers, podcast bros and Fox News were supposed to form an unbreakable wall of narrative control. But the president’s polling collapse is stunning. 

Trump’s net approval among Gen Z voters has plummeted from positive 10 points in February 2025 to negative 32 points now, a catastrophic 42-point drop in less than a year, according to a New York Times/Siena poll released Thursday. These are the same young voters, especially young men, who helped carry Trump to victory by shifting 13 points in his direction from 2020. 70% of voters under 30 now disapprove of his performance as president. While Trump’s approval on immigration was split 50-50 among voters in March 2025, 61% now disapprove, including seven in 10 independents who say ICE has gone too far. 

Trump knows he’s losing the narrative. That’s why he announced he was revising a lawsuit against the New York Times over polling that showed only 34% of independents approve of his job performance, threatening that “fake and fraudulent polling should be, virtually, a criminal offense.”

The right-wing information barrier that protected Trump from political consequences is crumbling. The manosphere is fragmenting. He can sue pollsters and threaten to investigate whomever he wants, but he can’t make Americans unsee what’s happening in Minneapolis.

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