A father and his nine-year-old daughter are dead because a Brooklyn building collapsed on them — and the press is blaming ICE instead of the city officials who greenlit the construction next door.

Juan Daniel Sabala, 31, and his daughter Nicole Daniela Rodriguez were among eight people killed Wednesday when their Flatbush Avenue building crumbled into an adjacent construction site. Nineteen more were injured. The real question isn't why the family was home. It's why the city approved excavation plans for the neighboring lot that lacked key structural reinforcement alongside the occupied building — and why that failure is being buried beneath an immigration narrative.

Both the New York Post and Gothamist led their coverage with the same angle: that the Sabala family stayed inside because they feared ICE agents. Cousin Juan Carlos Zabala, speaking from Spain, told Gothamist that "everything with ICE was really bothering them" and that they stayed "shut inside, from work to home and home to work, because they were afraid of being deported." The family was home Wednesday because it was Veterans Day.

That is a grieving relative's account of why they were indoors. It is not an explanation for why the building fell on them.

The Post, to its credit, reported at the bottom of its story that the city signed off on deep excavation plans for the adjacent construction site — a 25,000-square-foot mixed-use building — even though those plans "crucially did not include any hard reinforcements alongside the now-collapsed building," according to records and experts. Gothamist did not report the construction negligence angle at all.

So here is the actual public health crisis: a Democrat-run city approved a demolition and excavation plan that experts say lacked structural support for the building next door, and that building killed eight people. Sabala's wife remains in intensive care with their three-year-old daughter. Another victim was an Ecuadoran construction worker whose second child was days from being born.

The city's building oversight — or lack of it — put everyone in that building at risk, regardless of immigration status. But framing the story around ICE fear lets city officials off the hook for the decisions they made about construction permits and structural requirements. The Sabala family could have been home for any reason on a federal holiday. The building still would have collapsed.

New York has declared itself a sanctuary city, and its leaders have spent years broadcasting that they will not cooperate with federal immigration enforcement. The result, apparently, is a population that lives in fear of federal agents anyway — and housing so poorly regulated that buildings fall down. The city managed to fail these residents on both counts.

Who signed off on the excavation plan? What structural reviews were conducted — or skipped? Those are the questions that should be leading every headline. Instead, the public gets a story about deportation fear, and the officials who approved the construction that killed eight people get a pass.

The building didn't collapse because a family was afraid of ICE. It collapsed because someone let it.