Jacob Soboroff stood on the set of MS NOW and described activists banging pots and blowing brass instruments outside the hotels where federal agents sleep as something worth celebrating. "They were banging on pots, and they were blowing brass instruments to keep agents from sleep," he told his audience on November 1, 2026, with the kind of tone normally reserved for describing a charity food drive.
Then he called the agents "depraved."
The MSNBC host wasn't reporting the harassment of federal law enforcement officers as news. He was endorsing it. Soboroff referred to "the depraved actions of those armed and masked federal agents" — meaning the ICE officers conducting immigration enforcement operations in Minnesota and elsewhere — while airing footage of left-wing activists who've made a sport out of swarming hotels, disrupting neighborhoods, and turning noise harassment into a political weapon. The segment amounted to a cable news anchor cheerleading obstruction of federal law enforcement on camera.
The activists Soboroff was celebrating aren't a fringe operation. They're organized rapid-response networks that monitor ICE movements, gather outside hotels where agents are believed to be staying, and deploy coordinated noise campaigns designed to deprive them of sleep. The tactic gained national attention when crowds descended on a Homewood Suites by Hilton in Edina, Minnesota, where over a hundred protesters spent hours banging on pots, blowing noisemakers, and leaning on car horns in the middle of the night. The goal wasn't protest. It was physical harassment of people doing a lawful job.
Soboroff has built an entire editorial identity around framing ICE enforcement as villainy. He's previously called their operations a "reign of terror," slammed agents as "monsters," and accused enforcement officers of not going after "the worst of the worst." He's platformed activists, amplified anti-ICE musicians, and used his MS NOW show as a weekly editorial against immigration enforcement.
The agents conducting these enforcement operations are following federal law. They carry badges issued by the Department of Homeland Security. They answer to elected officials. The people banging pots at three in the morning answer to nobody, and that's exactly the dynamic Soboroff prefers.
The rebuttal from Soboroff's corner is predictable: he's just amplifying "community voices" and holding power accountable. Except ICE agents aren't the power in this equation. They're mid-level federal employees sleeping in chain hotels in Edina, Minnesota, while organized mobs try to break them psychologically before a shift. The "community" Soboroff is amplifying includes groups like Siembra in North Carolina and church-based networks organizing out of places like Dilworth United Methodist Church — groups that frame immigration enforcement as a moral atrocity and obstruction as a moral duty. Soboroff doesn't challenge that framing. He wraps it in the language of journalism and hands it a microphone.
"We are stronger together," Soboroff told his viewers, borrowing the kind of slogan that means nothing until you see who's included. In this version of "together," the people enforcing immigration law are on the outside. The people harassing them at their hotels at night are on the inside.
There's a phrase for a news anchor who watches footage of organized harassment against federal agents and calls the agents "depraved" instead of the mob. It's not journalist. Every other cable network would fire a host for openly rooting against law enforcement officers doing their legal duties. MSNBC gave Soboroff a show.