They Called ICE ‘Kidnappers.’ The Paper Proves Otherwise

I have been on the Martin Soto case since February. A few months ago, he was the face of the hunger strike inside the federal immigration detention center in Newark, New Jersey, known as Delaney Hall, and I contributed to the Daily Wire’s reporting on it since the media hysteria started. The 24 years that I spent at Immigration and Customs Enforcement taught me how to read an arrest record, and this one did not read right from the first article. So I followed the facts, boots on the ground, running down leads and facts.

Martin’s sob story captured the nation as his wife, Gabriela Soto, claimed ICE “abducted” him while he ran out to buy diapers for their baby.

This week, that narrative completely fell apart.

The arrest report we, at the Oversight Project, obtained shows that Soto was actually taken into custody that day by the Kearny Police Department for allegedly beating his wife, in the presence of children, no less.

On Feb. 1, local police arrested Martin. He was booked into the Hudson County jail that morning. A judge released him on his own recognizance the next afternoon, and ICE took him from the jail on a detainer. I have those records, and they’ve been published on the Oversight Project’s website.

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Gabriela is not a bystander to this story. She organized the protests outside Delaney Hall. She ran the GoFundMe that passed $67,000. She wrote the column. She used Instagram to rally supporters and to hand them a phone script for the New Jersey attorney general’s office. Members of Congress now call her Gabby.

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Elected officials did the same. Rep. Rob Menendez (D-NJ) wrote on the night Martin walked out that he was on his way to buy diapers for his children when ICE apprehended him. The police report was months old by then. Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) wore a “Free Martin Soto” pin. And when a Biden-appointed judge granted his release based on a habeas petition last week, Rep. Nellie Pou (D-NJ) said she was overjoyed. Menendez spent 18 hours outside Delaney Hall, promising a family he would not leave. Not one of those offices, as far as I can find, asked a police department for a single page of paper. Either they checked and said it anyway, or they never checked.

His lawyer says the domestic assault charge was dismissed. A dismissal does not turn a night in the county jail into a trip to the store, and it does not turn a lawful transfer on a detainer into a kidnapping.

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