On October 13, DHS said Rudi and Mirabela Lacatusu, Romanian nationals charged on Long Island over necklace thefts from elderly victims, are in ICE custody. Fox News headlined them a “‘Bonnie and Clyde’ illegal immigrant couple”. The headline’s subject is a label before it is two people. The reader meets a legend in quotation marks and a status, “illegal immigrant”, and only then the word “accused”. The order does the judging. The quotation marks borrow a phrase whose owner the headline never names; Fox’s first paragraph says it came from the Department of Homeland Security. The status comes from DHS too, the only source the story gives, and its account of the Nassau County police findings mentions no immigration status. The charges on the page are smaller than the sentence. Nassau County police charged each with three counts of fourth-degree grand larceny over thefts in Valley Stream, Franklin Square and East Meadow. In the one case Fox describes, a 73-year-old woman gave directions on October 5, was hugged, and later found her gold necklace, worth about $2,000, gone. The “four states” rest on DHS, with no charges named outside New York. The tell: a label stands where the deed should be, and the deed arrives lower down. The word “illegal” works here as a verdict noun: one word that files two people under a category before a court hears them, and lets the category carry the crime. The habit it rides is reading a stranger’s act as his kind’s nature, where a neighbor’s would be his circumstances. That moves the coverage from Identification to Essentialization, and Mullin’s “rob more Americans” reaches Threat Assessment. The savior arrives in the same statement: ICE custody and removal, with Gov. Kathy Hochul cast as the one who would let them go.
