NBC’s Latest ICE Sob Story Fell Apart Over the Contents of One Shopping Cart

NBC News begged you to cry over two teenage sisters abandoned by ICE.

Bill Melugin found the sentence NBC hoped nobody would read.

One shopping cart is the reason this entire sob story collapsed.

The Walmart Run That Started Everything

NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth ran the story like a hit piece on ICE.

The network's headline read, "U.S. Citizen Teens Left Behind When ICE Deported Their Parents."

Reporters spent paragraph after paragraph on two sisters, Dulce and Maria Zepeda, suddenly without their mom and dad.

Then, buried deep in NBC's own copy, came the detail that undid the entire narrative.

Their mother, Daysi Eladi Munoz-Duron, was arrested by Burleson police on suspicion of shoplifting at a Walmart.

Police say she walked out with a mop, some toilet paper, and crab meat she never paid for.

That arrest, not some midnight ICE raid on a law-abiding family, is what put her on federal radar in the first place.

Bill Melugin Says the Quiet Part Out Loud

Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin read NBC's own article and found the line that mattered most.

"As usual, buried within the underlying article is the revelation that their mother was arrested by local police on suspicion of shoplifting," Melugin wrote, "which is how the parents ended up on ICE's radar as they were both in the US illegally."

Munoz-Duron and her husband were in the country illegally, and once police ran her name, ICE had every legal right to act.

DHS confirmed she "accepted a voluntary return, and was deported on August 26, 2025."

Nobody snatched her off a sidewalk on her way to church.

She got caught stealing, got flagged as an illegal alien, and chose to go home rather than fight it in court.

Dulce Zepeda Is Nineteen Years Old Not Nine

NBC wants readers picturing toddlers crying for their parents at a border fence.

Dulce Zepeda is nineteen years old, a legal adult under Texas law who can sign a lease, hold a job, and take care of her thirteen year old sister.

Her mother's own words, quoted in the coverage, undercut the abandonment narrative NBC was selling.

She said she "hugged me and told me to take care of my sister" before she left.

That is not chaos.

That is a mother making an arrangement, on her way out the door, after getting caught breaking the law twice.

Democrats and their friends in the press keep hunting for the next photogenic ICE horror story because the first few didn't hold up either.

CNN ran the same script in September, claiming more than 100 US citizen kids were "stranded" by ICE, and it collapsed the same way this one just did the moment someone read past the headline.

The Department of Homeland Security has now debunked so many of these "sob stories" that reporters should be embarrassed to keep filing them, and yet the wire keeps humming with new ones every few weeks.

Here is what never makes the headline.

Illegal immigrants across this country have been offered 2,600 dollars and a flight home if they self-deport before ICE ever knocks.

Munoz-Duron and her husband knew that offer existed and knew what a shoplifting arrest would trigger, and they gambled anyway.

Trump's ICE did not tear this family apart.

A shoplifting charge and two illegal immigrants who knew the risk did that, and NBC just didn't want its own readers to notice.

Every one of these stories runs the same play: find a sympathetic face, bury the arrest record in paragraph fourteen, and let the headline do the lying.

Readers who only skim the email preview never even get that far, which is exactly how NBC wanted it.

Sources:

• Bill Melugin, "Bill Melugin Adds Context NBC News Could NOT Find Room for in Attempted Deportation Sob Story," Twitchy, August 17, 2026.
• Department of Homeland Security, official statement on Daysi Eladi Munoz-Duron deportation, August 2026.
• NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth, "U.S. Citizen Teens Left Behind When ICE Deported Their Parents," NBC News, August 2026.
• Jennifer Oliver O'Connell, "Another ICE Family Separation Sob Story Is Not What It Seems," RedState, August 18, 2026.