Fox News often takes the spotlight for its sensational news coverage, but one Fox News anchor appears to have taken the network a step further.

The anchor, Trace Gallagher, claimed that a new study has shown 100,000 illegal aliens have left Arizona since the passage of a draconian new law, SB 1070, that allows police to check the immigration status of anyone they pull over.

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“The way they got the numbers is they crunched them using the current US population survey and then they had numbers from the Mexican government, is what they came up with, is that 100,000 illegals have left Arizona — there are 100,000 illegals fewer before SB 1070 was ever talked about,” Gallagher said.

Only that’s not what the study says. The study actually says that the immigration law in Arizona has likely provoked the voluntary departure of 100,000 Hispanics from the southern US state.

In fact, even the words beneath Gallagher’s face spell out what the study says: “100K FEWER HISPANICS IN AZ SINCE IMMIGRATION DEBATE.”

“Several months after the law was applied, it’s possible to observe a lower number of Hispanics in that area of America. We estimate there are 100,000 less Hispanics compared to the start of 2010,” said the report by the private BBVA Bancomer foundation, released at the two-day Global Forum on Migration and Development, in the Pacific resort of Puerto Vallarta.

“It’s possible that this reduction is largely due to the potential application of the law,” the report said.

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It was unclear where those who left Arizona had gone, but most were probably elsewhere in the United States, it added.

Arizona’s governor July approved the law giving police broader powers to pursue illegal immigrants in July, but a federal judge temporarily blocked some of its more controversial provisions, including making it a crime not to carry proper papers.

About 30 percent of Arizona’s 6.6 million people are Hispanic, according to US census data. One third of them are foreign born, including the estimated 460,000 illegal immigrants in the state.

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Gallagher’s comment appears at about 55 seconds into the record, which was highlighted by Media Matters, a liberal nonprofit.

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Detailed information on the study is available here.