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.
Gabriela’s story kept changing. She told NJ Advance Media he left about 5:30 on the evening of Feb. 2 for diapers. In her own column, she wrote that Martin was abducted on a Feb. 1 diaper run. In July, she told the Daily Wire he left the house at 5:30 on Feb. 1. Kearny Life said he was detained on Feb. 2, walking home from a store three blocks away. Four versions of one evening. He was in a county jail for all of it.
In that same column, she described a call on Feb. 1 from a number listed as prison or jail, a day before ICE had him. In her message to the Daily Wire, she wrote that she knew exactly where her husband was at the time. A woman who gets a call from a jail, and says she knows exactly where her husband is, does not need a newspaper to tell her.
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.
Then the story traveled. NJ Advance Media printed it first. Truthout and the Real News Network ran her column under a headline that used the word “kidnapped.” Democracy Now! had her on in May and again in August. NPR’s Code Switch told listeners he was picked up on his way to get diapers. In May, CNN reported that ICE detained him on Jan. 20 as he bought diapers, a date that appears nowhere in the records. In that same sentence, CNN noted he had previously been arrested in an alleged domestic violence incident, with the charges dismissed and expunged, according to his attorneys. The two halves of that sentence were never reconciled. The arrest is how ICE got him. Most of the other coverage I am describing ran before the police records surfaced, and I understand that. What I cannot excuse is what ran after. The Daily Wire first reported the records on July 24. In October, Mother Jones put “Martin Soto Went Out for Diapers” in a headline. The Philadelphia Inquirer still carried the diaper line, attributed to her, the day after his release.
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.
I have seen this playbook before. In June 2025, a Los Angeles family and attorney held a press conference claiming a mother had been taken at gunpoint by masked men and held in a warehouse. In January 2026, a federal grand jury indicted her, alleging she walked from that parking lot into a friend’s sedan, stayed in Bakersfield, called relatives from a blocked number, and altered her appearance for “rescue” photos. The indictment alleges immigrant-rights groups repeated her account at a press conference. Reporters repeated it, too. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass posted it the next day, and the Department of Homeland Security told her publicly that she had pushed a “hoax” and still had time to delete it. A mayor has staff, a police department, and a federal liaison. Either her office checked and she posted anyway, or her office never checked. I would like to know what she did afterward.
So here is my question for every newsroom that pushed this false narrative and every office I have named: Martin Soto’s police records have been public since February, and his own lawyers told CNN about the arrest in May. Why hasn’t anyone made the correction? When I checked this week, none of the pieces I just described carried a correction or an editor’s note. Nobody owes me an apology. I testified in front of Congress and told everyone the entire situation at Delaney Hall is a farce and all theatrics, but I was laughed at, made fun of by some Democratic representatives, and called a “MAGA witness” for speaking the truth under oath. Why? Why didn’t that spark investigations of their own? No, it was an entire session on abolishing ICE.
THEY DRUG 5-YEAR-OLDS TO SMUGGLE THEM FOR $900 A HEAD. WHY IS CONGRESS LOOKING AWAY?
I know these stories are built to shock, and I think they’re working. A Los Angeles hoax and a New Jersey diaper run raised money, moved politicians, and put federal officers on the receiving end of the public’s anger. I call it a campaign against the men and women who do this job, and it ran on stories that could not survive one record request to Hudson County.
I am not doing this for myself. I did this work for 24 years. I know what “right” looks like. Those officers did their jobs, and they have been called kidnappers on air, online, and by people who swore an oath to the Constitution. They did not deserve it, and every one of the people who said it knows where to find the records.
Scott Mechkowski is a visiting fellow at the Oversight Project and Mass Deportation Coalition, and he retired in 2018 as deputy field office director for ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations in New York City.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
