MS NOW Slams Pro-ICE Christians as Hypocrites, Talks Up Lefty Agitators

On Wednesday's Morning Joe, MS NOW host Joe Scarborough lambasted pro-ICE Christians at the same time that national correspondent Jacob Soboroff gave encouraging words to left-wing agitators as he touted their anti-ICE harassment as successful.

The segment was focused on Soboroff fretting over the increase in children who have been detained with illegal alien parents in family detention centers during President Donald Trump's second term. Scarborough called the practice "ghastly" and co-host Mika Brzezinski called it "sick" during the introduction.

MIKA BRZEZINSKI: Your analysis found at least 500 babies --

JOE SCARBOROUGH: This is just unbelievable.

BRZEZINSKI: -- and toddlers have been detained by ICE --

SCARBOROUGH: How ghastly they are.

BRZEZINSKI: -- and sick -- since President Trump returned to office in 2025.

As is typical for the liberal news network, it was not mentioned that Trump's efforts have saved thousands of migrants from dying on the border and has freed thousands of illegal alien children from abusive circumstances who were lost by the Joe Biden administration. This is what partisan journalism looks like. 

At one point, Scarborough started ranting against conservative Christians:

...we've been talking about the hypocrisy of Christian nationalists for, for quite some time. Anybody that supports this policy (who) claims to be a Christian is just, again, I don't know where they have been while the preachers have been preaching about what Jesus said.

There's no mention of leftists talking up the "rule of law" and promoting the mass importation of illegal immigrants, and then undermining law enforcement during deportations. He soon added:

So obviously Jesus making a great point that you go out of your way to protect children. And, by the way, people who claim to be pro-life -- "Oh, we're for babies when their unborn, but after they're born, they can be locked up in internment camps and, in just the worst --" It's really, I mean, it's just even -- even by hypocritical standards of people who call themselves evangelicals supporting this sort of stuff, even this is shocking to me.

Toward the end of the segment, Soboroff credited anti-ICE agitators with deterring immigration enforcement in cities like Minneapolis and Chicago:

Tom Homan has talked about maybe increasing enforcement in this very city, New York. ... not only will they come, guys, and run through the streets like they have done with Greg Bovino in these other cities, but the people will also come out. And I think that that is the most important thing to note is that that is what has stopped Greg Bovino. That is what stopped the mass deportation effort in Charlotte, in Minneapolis, in Chicago, in Los Angeles. All these places where I have covered it is the people standing up and pushing back. And it has worked every single time.

By contrast, about a month earlier, Fox & Friends and other Fox shows informed viewers about left-wing activists who surrounded a hospital in New York after ICE agents arrested a violent illegal alien and brought him to the hospital for medical treatment. Getting him out against proved to be difficult.

Transcripts follow:

MS NOW's Morning Joe

June 10, 2026

7:19 a.m. Eastern

MIKA BRZEZINSKI: I really appreciate your reporting, Jacob. You have new reporting for MS NOW in collaboration with the Marshall Project, looking at America's youngest detainees. Your analysis found at least 500 babies --

JOE SCARBOROUGH: This is just unbelievable.

BRZEZINSKI: -- and toddlers have been detained by ICE --

SCARBOROUGH: How ghastly they are.

BRZEZINSKI: -- and sick -- since President Trump returned to office in 2025. You spoke with some of the families that were impacted. What more can you tell us about what you found and what you heard from them?

JACOB SOBOROFF: You know, I am actually extremely glad that the President has tuned in this morning because this is an extension of a policy that, during the first term, Physicians for Human Rights said was torture, according to the United Nations. I'm talking about family separation -- government-sanctioned child abuse according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. And with our reporting partners at the Marshall Project, this is the first of its kind in the collaboration between MS NOW and the Marshall Project.

We have analyzed data from the deportation data project that shows 500, as you said, little kids -- babies and toddlers -- have been detained by ICE since the beginning of just Trump 2.0, and that is only through March of this year. We don't have data after March, but this will be lifelong consequences for these little kids inside a family prison in the United States.

And let me say that one more time, a prison for families, the Dilley detention center in the United States of America that was closed under President Trump's predecessor, President Biden, and reopened by President Trump only for the reason detaining families with little kids inside of them.

(...)

SOBOROFF: ...what people who advocate on behalf of these babies and children want is to close this facility -- the detention center in Texas that the allegations of conditions are just horrific. ICE, of course, says this is a family-friendly facility; DHS says this is a family-friendly facility; and CoreCivic who -- by the way, is making a profit off of detaining babies --

BRZEZINSKI: So much money.

SOBOROFF: -- and families at this facility -- says this is a family-friendly facility and that conditions there are decent.

WILLIE GEIST: It takes some audacity to call family-friendly a place where you're detaining one- and two-year-olds. Can you speak, Jacob, to why the parents even were being detained in the first place because that's an important part of the story? In most of the cases in your reporting here, people who either presented themselves at legal ports of entry or went to an appointment where they thought they were safe and doing the right thing and were detained along with their babies.

SOBOROFF: Yeah, the idea that an asylum -- a political asylum seeker would be locked up at all once they pass their credible fear screening at the border is different from things -- from how things used to be. And all of these families that are inside of here in one way or another -- these are not violent criminals. These are certainly not the worst of the worst. They would be in prisons or they would be separated actually from their children and locked up -- the parents in a separate ICE facility. These are people who just have immigration violations.

And we're talking about when Joaquin Castro went there -- the congressman from the San Antonio area -- early on in this administration, there were 1,000 people inside this facility. That number has steadily gone down because of efforts by him -- and we're going to have this full report that airs on my show this weekend that's almost 20 minutes that shows how hard they've been working to get people out of there. But the answer is no good reason other than they have immigration violations. They came here as undocumented people seeking political asylum, and the President wants to lock them up with their babies.

(...)

JOE SCARBOROUGH: David, again, we've been talking about the hypocrisy of Christian nationalists for, for quite some time. Anybody that supports this policy (who) claims to be a Christian is just, again, I don't know where they have been while the preachers have been preaching about what Jesus said. "Let the -- let the little children come. Anyone that does -- does harm to -- to a little one better than a millstone be hung around his neck and sunk to the bottom of the sea than he was ever born." That's Jesus's words again.

So obviously Jesus making a great point that you go out of your way to protect children. And, by the way, people who claim to be pro-life -- "Oh, we're for babies when their unborn, but after they're born, they can be locked up in internment camps and, in just the worst --" It's really, I mean, it's just even -- even by hypocritical standards of people who call themselves evangelicals supporting this sort of stuff, even this is shocking to me.

DAVID FRENCH, NEW YORK TIMES COLUMNIST: Well, you know, and what really compounds it, I think what's important about the report is that he was talking that these -- these families are guilty only of immigration violations. This is not a situation where you have violent criminals and children because, as was stated, in that circumstance, you would have separation.

So you're talking about people who are guilty of, you know, entry into -- illegal entry is a misdemeanor. A visa overstay isn't a crime at all. And so you've got people who are guilty -- if they're guilty at all of a crime -- of something at a misdemeanor level leading to family detention for extended periods of time. I mean, this is extraordinary.

And I think a lot of people aren't understanding how draconian and how punitive the Trump crackdown is. And then, when you do point it out, they raise the red herring, the straw man of, "Oh, well, you must be for open borders," that the alternative to this program is nothing but unrestrained immigration, when that is absolutely not true at all.

CLAIRE McCASKILL, MS NOW CONTRIBUTOR: Jacob, I'm curious what's going on inside DHS with Markwayne Mullin and (Tom) Homan kind of taking over from some of the craziest folks that were running the place. It feels like to me that Stephen Miller is still pulling the levers and figuring out ways to find anybody who is not of white European descent to get them out of the country. What is going on now with the folks in charge compared to what was going on when they were murdering people in the streets of Minneapolis?

SOBOROFF: There is no doubt about it that nothing has changed, Claire, just because Greg Bovino is not running around the country in his military costume, throwing flash bang grenades and smoke canisters at protesters, killing both migrants and American citizens alike with the operations all around the country, including Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti. The underlying policy is still the same -- mass deportation is family separation by another name...

(...)

Tom Homan has talked about maybe increasing enforcement in this very city, New York. I talked to the mayor when he was mayor-elect about what that would look like in this city. And rest-assured, not only will they come, guys, and run through the streets like they have done with Greg Bovino in these other cities, but the people will also come out. And I think that that is the most important thing to note is that that is what has stopped Greg Bovino. That is what stopped the mass deportation effort in Charlotte, in Minneapolis, in Chicago, in Los Angeles. All these places where I have covered it is the people standing up and pushing back. And it has worked every single time.

(...)

Fox & Friends

May 4, 2026

6:38 a.m. Eastern

BRIAN KILMEADE: So you're not going to believe what happened yesterday. Once again, an ICE clash. To be in ICE these days is really to have to show some courage and know that you're doing the right thing. So in Brooklyn they found a Nigerian who overstayed his visa who is up for assault as well as drug possession charges. So they picked him up and brought him to the hospital for some of his injuries, at which time word went out to protesters and to anti-ICE protesters. And they created havoc, causing the NYPD to finally act.

AINSLEY EARHARDT: So he entered the U.S. with a tourist visa on August 27, 2023 three years ago. He was supposed to go home on February 26, 2024, a few months later but he didn't. He refused to comply with officers' demands to exit the vehicle. Then he tried to hit the officers with his car, and then he became physically combative and tried to punch and elbow an ICE officer. So the officers -- they used minimum amount of force, they said.

The suspect claimed he needed medical attention, then when they took him to the hospital in Brooklyn, he refused to comply, threw himself on the floor, started screaming. Eventually,  he was cleared to leave, and, when he did, word had gotten out, and, Charlie, there were 200 protesters outside trying to stop the agents from arresting him.