This story appeared on Corey Hutchins’ Substack site on February 14, 2025.
A Denver TV station made national news this week for its coverage of local ICE raids under the new Trump administration.
Across the country, local news organizations have come under fire from immigration officials and the Republican president’s supporters. When ICE agents have not been as successful as planned with recent roundups, the agency has blamed local media for what they called “leaks.”
Writing in Columbia Journalism Review, the magazine that covers the media industry, Josh Hersh reported on the role of local journalism amid these ICE raids.
He zeroed in on Colorado, the state that is home to a city Trump chose as the namesake during his campaign for a promised national deportation plan he called “Operation Aurora.”
Now that raids are rolling out across the country, how local news organizations, including those in Colorado, are responding has become its own story.
From the piece in CJR’s “The Media Today”:
Chris Vanderveen, 9News’s director of special projects, quickly dispatched teams of reporters to pursue the leads. “One crew said, ‘I think I’m going to follow the vehicles, and see where they go,’” Vanderveen explained. “I said, ‘Great. Do not get in the way.’” On Wednesday, ICE officials claimed to have “targeted” more than a hundred “violent Venezuelan gang” members for arrest and detention. 9News journalists confirmed that raids took place at several apartment buildings and a mobile home community, but reported that the number of people who were taken into custody was much lower. (ICE officials later acknowledged that they had detained only about thirty people, just one of whom was identified as a gang member.)
The next day, Vanderveen was surprised to see Tom Homan, the White House “border czar,” blame the limited number of arrests on the fact that news of the raids had publicly leaked. “We’re not going to tolerate it anymore,” Homan told Fox News. “This is not a game.” Homan later indicated that ICE might restrict how much access reporters had to officials during future raids.
Hersh reported how one TV presenter who works for the national FOX cable TV channel framed the Denver raid.
“There had been media leaks,” the presenter said. “The media articles written that this entire operation was coming — and when we were with them, within the first couple hours, it seemed every property they went to was either vacant or the targets they were after simply weren’t there.”
More from the CJR story:
9News’s Vanderveen scoffed at the idea that the reporters covering raids are privy to sensitive information. “There was no leak necessary to figure this one out,” he said, of the operation in Denver. “The worst-kept secret in the world is when you put a bunch of vehicles and personnel dressed in fatigues in shopping-center parking lots.”
That may have been the point: the ICE raids are a show of force, part of a campaign by the Trump administration to demonstrate the use of aggressive tactics to remove people who officials claim are violent and dangerous. In Denver, at least, that wasn’t how things turned out. “It couldn’t have possibly gone wrong because we were obvious with what we were doing,” Vanderveen said, of how those in charge appear to be seeing things. “It had to be the press.”
For nearly six months, a story has consumed local media about the extent of the influence that a Venezuelan gang called Tren de Aragua has in Aurora and its relationship to the living conditions at a handful of troubled apartment complexes in Colorado’s third-largest city.
Reaction on social media to the coverage and commentary has become something of a Rorschach test for a political worldview as narratives and framing have varied sharply. The storylines made national news and grabbed the attention of Trump during his campaign for president.
With Trump in office, reporters are covering the federal government’s response.
Last week, one immigrant family in one of the Aurora apartments was on FaceTime with Denver7 reporter Kristian Lopez as ICE agents entered their apartment. The segment offered a real-time view of one early morning raid as a couple prepared to take their daughter to school.
Kevin Beaty of the hyperlocal news site Denverite spent the night at an Aurora apartment complex. When he reported a photo-heavy story headlined “What we saw from inside ICE’s raid at Aurora’s Edge apartments,” it included this line:
All newly arrived immigrants we spoke to for this story asked to have their last names withheld, fearing deportation or consequences in their pending asylum cases. Most gave us middle names, or nicknames, for identification in this story
The Aurora Sentinel, the weekly newspaper serving the city, offered a “fact check” stating there was “no proof” of media tipping off local immigration activists to the raids.
Last week, 9NEWS covered ICE’s complaints about what the agency called leaks.
“Despite concerns about leaked information, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement did little to hide those operations Wednesday, assembling in high-traffic, visible retail center parking lots across Denver before moving to homes to conduct raids,” Evan Kruegel of 9NEWS, who followed one particular convoy, reported for the station.
“It didn’t take long for community members to see the visible operation at a park, and activists showed up shortly thereafter, following the convoy to a raid in a Thornton mobile home park,” he reported. “Activists shouted at immigration officials and at Thornton Police, who told 9NEWS they were there for crowd control.”
On the 9NEWS nightly newscast “Next,” anchor Kyle Clark and reporter Kruegel addressed the local media leak theory and spoke to University of Denver journalism professor Kareem El Damanhoury.
“What is happening with President Donald Trump is that … his administration is creating a spectacle,” El Damanhoury said, adding that he wasn’t surprised to see such a visible operation that included embedded ride-alongs with a select cable TV channel.
El Damanhoury said journalists will play an important role in the weeks to come about the details and impacts of such raids.
“To be clear, we as an organization are not accepting any invitations for ride-alongs with immigration officials at this time,” Kruegel said on air about 9NEWS. “We will, however, continue to respond and report on what we see at those operations.”
In recent days, ire about leaks has shifted from the local media to the FBI.
“We think it’s coming from inside. And we know the first leak in Aurora is under current investigation,” Trump’s border chief told a FOX cable show host. “We think we’ve identified that person.”
Corey Hutchins is co-director of Colorado College’s Journalism Institute, reports on the U.S. local media scene for Columbia Journalism Review, and is a journalist for multiple news outlets. Subscribe to his Inside the News newsletter, here.