An ICE agent breaks into his ex-girlfriend's apartment, and the press treats it as an indictment of every officer trying to secure this country — while the same outlets bury the work those officers actually do every day.

Thomas Bailey, a 58-year-old ICE officer, was jailed Friday in St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana, on a charge of unauthorized entry into his ex-girlfriend's apartment near Covington. Nobody was home. The sheriff's office booked him. ICE issued a statement saying the "vast majority" of its employees "perform their duties with professionalism and honor" and that any provable misconduct will be punished.

That should be the end of it — one bad actor, one arrest, one system working as intended. But The Guardian wasn't content to report the crime. The outlet stretched Bailey's arrest into an indictment of ICE itself, citing an Associated Press review that found roughly two dozen ICE employees and contractors charged with crimes since 2020 — out of an agency with thousands of personnel. The Guardian then linked Bailey's case to a fatal shooting in Biddeford, Maine, by another ICE officer, David Brouillette, whose ex-wives alleged abusive behavior. Border chief Tom Homan himself questioned whether Brouillette "should have ever cleared vetting." The implication was clear: the agency is broken, the hiring is broken, the mission is broken.

The pattern is as old as the press itself: isolate a bad actor, then use him to discredit the entire enterprise. What The Guardian buried is what ICE officers were doing the same week — the work the press refuses to cover.

Fox News reported that ICE arrested Ernesto Alejandro Perez-Garcia, a Mexican national, Thursday morning in Redondo Beach, California. Perez-Garcia has illegally entered the United States five times and made four additional attempted crossings. His rap sheet stretches back to 2003: driving without a license, controlled substance paraphernalia, and a 2006 conviction for threatening crime with intent to terrorize, for which he received 60 days in jail and three years' probation. ICE removed him to Mexico in May 2006. He was back within a month, arrested again for terroristic threats.

Since 2020, Redondo Beach police have arrested him five times for disorderly conduct — twice this year alone. And twice, in 2020 and again in 2026, the Redondo Beach Police Department declined to honor ICE's detainer requests. Perez-Garcia himself told Fox that local police tipped him off: "Redondo PD had told me about it, you know, Redondo PD was cool with it. They let me go with it."

A sanctuary city releases a five-time illegal entrant with terroristic threat convictions, tips him off that federal agents want him, and puts him back on the street — and the press shrugs. One ICE agent commits a domestic crime, and it's a front-page indictment of the agency's hiring practices and the entire deportation agenda.

ICE says it will hold Bailey accountable. That's what accountability looks like. The open question is who holds the press accountable when it weaponizes one man's misconduct to undermine the people still trying to do the job.