Fox News Reporter Sends Axios to the Burn Ward for Gaslighting ICE Arrest Numbers Under Biden

One thing people need to keep in mind as the Trump administration settles back in and continues to do the hard work of undoing the damage left behind by Joe Biden, the former president's apologists in the press are going to continue doing their thing because it's just who they are.

For instance, we've seen it with CNN's Brian Stelter, who bizarrely tried to portray Biden's frequent disappearances from the public eye as a good thing in comparison to Donald Trump being front and center and bantering with news outlets daily, because I guess a POTUS hiding from the media for days at a time is good for government transparency and accountability.

Then there was NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik, who laughably took the "bbbut Biden" route when Fox News anchor John Roberts pointed out a "big win" for Trump in the southern border PR wars between the United States and Mexico.

Another reporter who is not playing around with Biden's apologists in the MSM is Fox News national correspondent Bill Melugin, who straight up nuked Axios over their skewed framing of a story on Biden's ICE arrest numbers versus Trump's.

Here was the tweet and headline in question:

SCOOP: U.S. agents arrested more than 21,000 unauthorized immigrants in November as President Biden's term wound down — a pace the Trump administration doesn't appear to be matching in its first month despite its crackdown, an Axios review of data finds. https://t.co/Dha0hU7rtr
— Axios (@axios) February 14, 2025

Melugin, who has spent a considerable amount of time directly at the border over the last several years and who at times has also embedded with border patrol officials, saw the tweet and went off:

I cannot believe this was printed. @RussContreras (the same guy who wrote Biden had the most secure border ever) now has a "scoop" that Biden's Border Patrol in November arrested more illegal migrants than Trump's is now.
Yes, because illegal crossings have fallen to microscopic levels since Trump took office. There are far fewer people to arrest. And if you want to talk ICE data, the Trump admin ICE made more interior arrests in two weeks than Biden did in the entire month of November.

Contreras, in case anyone was wondering, is a "race and justice reporter" for Axios.

Next, Melugin pointed to more slanted "reporting" from Contreras on Biden's border crisis, and shared how Contreras ended up blocking him because apparently the criticisms from one journalist to another hit a little too close to the mark:

pic.twitter.com/HFv30MdP8W
— Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) February 14, 2025

Interestingly, when one clicks the link and reads the Axios story, they include a tidbit about the "dramatic dip" in border crossers under Trump, something an Axios comms person pointed out to Melugin.

But he was, rightly, unimpressed because that wasn't the focus of the tweet and headline, which gave readers a starkly different spin on the ICE arrest numbers comparison:

So you knew that - and this was the headline and framing you went with? pic.twitter.com/zxRJqcj9lJ
— Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) February 14, 2025

Ding ding ding, we have a winner here.

Left-leaning outlets know what they're doing when they do this, I've seen it so often I can practically recognize it and call it out in my sleep at this point. They know that for a lot of people, the "story" is what's in the headline and included in the tweet or Facebook posting or what have you. And that it will be what readers run with when they share it elsewhere.

It's one of the most pervasive forms of media bias out there, which is why it is critically important to click beyond the headlines and tweets to find out the full story because, as the Axios article demonstrated, looks can sometimes be very, very deceiving and, in my opinion, deliberately so.