Griff Jenkins huddled in the bushes before scrambling down the river bank to confront a group of migrants trying to cross

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

A Fox News reporter took immigration enforcement into his own hands, lurking in the bushes along the US southern border to “foil” an attempt by migrants to enter the country.

A segment aired on the network showed reporter Griff Jenkins in McAllen, Texas, where he spotted a group of Hondurans trying to cross a river from Mexico into the United States on a raft.

“We laid in the bushes in wait and we busted one of those smuggling operations,” Jenkins said in the Tuesday segment.

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Huddled in the brush, Jenkins explained his mission, before scrambling down the river bank to confront a group of migrants attempting to cross on a raft.

“We’ve been hiding in the bushes waiting to witness one of these crossings. Let’s go – they’re coming right now,” he said. “You can see they’ve come in, they’ve got a family on a raft.”

Trailed by his camera, Jenkins yelled out to a group of men, women and children on a small raft that one man was paddling across.

“Excuse me, sir, were you trying to cross into America illegally?” Jenkins asked.

The raft turned around and headed back to the river bank on the Mexican side of the border, as Fox displayed onscreen text that read: “Griff foils illegals’ attempt to cross border.”

“What we’re witnessing now is clearly a family that was being brought over by that smuggler that was paddling the raft. This is an attempt to illegally cross, and they’ve gone back over there,” Jenkins said. “We seem to have foiled this attempt, but officials tell us that he’s probably just going back to look for another spot.”

Later, Jenkins caught up with the migrants. He asked a woman in the group if she knew the crossing was illegal, and she said yes. “Can you tell me why you came illegally?” he asked.

The woman offered a factual answer, saying she made the journey because of “the situation of Honduras”.

“You cannot have work there because criminals always will get your money,” she said.

Text on the screen then read: “Illegal admits to knowingly breaking the law.”

The Fox reporter’s tactics drew criticism on social media. “That’s Griff Jenkins, the Fox News REPORTER, stopping people from illegally crossing the border,” Kamahl Santamaria, a presenter at Al Jazeera English, wrote on Twitter. “This isn’t reporting. It’s a news channel doing the work of a government. It’s state propaganda.”

Bishop Rudolph McKissick Jr, senior pastor of the Bethel Baptist Institutional church in Jacksonville, Florida, added in a tweet: “They are so disgusting.”

Fox has been uniquely friendly among cable networks to the administration of Donald Trump, which has pursued hardline immigration policies.

Hope Hicks, formerly Trump’s communications director, took a job this month as chief communications officer for Fox, the news network’s parent company. Former Fox News co-president Bill Shine, meanwhile, was appointed White House communications director in July, taking over Hicks’s old role.