A man attacked a federal building in New York City with an improvised explosive device (IED), an airsoft rifle, axes, knives, a hammer, a machete, and anti-ICE propaganda. He set off the IED inside the building which housed an ICE field office, an immigration court, DHS personnel, and other federal agencies. He was arrested on the spot.
So naturally, CNN wanted to know what ICE did to provoke him.
Sara Sidner, filling in for Abby Phillip on CNN NewsNight Monday, put the question asked: "But is it possible that it is the actions of ICE that have people talking like this?"
Read that back. Federal employees were nearly firebombed to death at work by a domestic terrorist, and CNN's instinct is to workshop whether the victims had it coming.
Thankfully CNN commentator Scott Jennings didn't let her get away with that assertation.
Jennings to his credit, had already laid the groundwork before Sidner made her move. He pointed out that "words do matter. So do actions, right?" — drawing a line between the escalating anti-ICE rhetoric from elected officials and the escalating violence against ICE personnel. Vehicle attacks against ICE officers are up 3,300 percent. That's not a typo. Three thousand, three hundred percent.
"Of course, I agree with Homan, and it's not a single guy," Jennings also said. "This is another in a long string of attacks on ICE personnel, ICE facilities." A pattern. A trend. Not a lone wolf but a growing pack — fed by exactly the kind of framing Sidner was modeling in real time.
But the segment's real tell came from former Clinton White House aide Keith Boykin, who jumped in to blame — wait for it — President Trump. "In one very clear example, the President of the United States, Donald Trump, implicitly encouraged people to resort to violence," Boykin claimed. A man walks into a federal building with a machete and an incendiary device carrying anti-ICE literature, and the Clinton guy finds a way to pin it on Trump. The material writes itself.
This is part of a broader pattern in CNN's coverage. The formula is simple: violence happens against ICE agents, CNN skips the perpetrator's motives (literally written on his anti-ICE materials), and pivots to whether the target agency is really the problem. It's victim-blaming dressed up as journalism.
The 3,300 percent spike in vehicle attacks isn't happening in a vacuum. It's happening in an environment where members of Congress have called ICE officers "Nazis," where city governments have passed laws to obstruct federal immigration enforcement, and where cable news hosts treat an attempted firebombing as a conversation starter about whether the firebombed agency needs to do some soul-searching.
Sidner asked if ICE's "actions" might explain why people are attacking ICE. Jennings and Homan gave her the answer — a 3,300 percent increase in attacks fueled by exactly the rhetoric she was repeating on air. She asked the question twice anyway.
When you can't tell the difference between covering a story and continuing the cycle that created it, you're not doing journalism anymore. You're doing something else, and CNN keeps finding new ways to demonstrate what that something else looks like.