July 1st, 2025 | Devon Kash

Media Goes Insane Over A Canadian Drug Trafficker's Death

A convicted criminal died in ICE custody, and journalists lost their minds.

On June 23, 2025, a Canadian citizen named Johnny Noviello died while in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement at the Krome North Service Processing Centre in Miami, Florida. As news of his death emerged, headlines flashed across Canadian and American media outlets with phrases like "Canadian dies in ICE custody" or "Canada demands answers after citizen dies in U.S. detention". The implication was clear: an innocent Canadian man had perished under suspicious and possibly cruel conditions in one of Trump's detention centres, and Canadians should be angry. But as with so many things, what was glaringly absent from these emotionally charged headlines was context. Specifically, the context of who Johnny Noviello actually was, what he had done, and why he was in ICE custody to begin with. And what this omission reveals about the state of modern journalism is far more unsettling than his death.

Let's begin with the facts the media chose to bury in the lower paragraphs of their stories.

Noviello was not simply an average Canadian traveler who took a wrong turn or overstayed a visa. He was a convicted drug trafficker with an extensive criminal record in Florida. In October 2023, he was found guilty in Volusia County, Florida, of serious charges including racketeering and trafficking in powerful opioids such as oxycodone and hydrocodone. The scope of the charges paints a clear picture of a man not dabbling in minor street crime, but deeply involved in the distribution of highly addictive and destructive drugs. These are not the actions of someone caught with a joint or a few grams of cannabis. These are the hallmarks of organized narcotics trafficking—crimes that fuel addiction, destroy communities, and cost lives.

After serving his sentence, Noviello was arrested by ICE on May 15, 2025, at his probation office in Daytona Beach. The arrest was not random, nor was it politically motivated. It was based on established federal law that permits the detention and deportation of lawful permanent residents who are convicted of certain crimes—drug trafficking among them. Noviello had been a lawful permanent resident in the U.S. since 1991, but that status comes with conditions. He violated those conditions and, following legal procedure, was detained to begin the deportation process.

And yet, none of this seemed to matter to the media. The bulk of coverage—particularly from Canadian sources—focused on the conditions of his detention, on the grief of his family, on the Canadian government's outrage. The CBC, CTV, The Guardian, and other major outlets ran emotionally charged stories emphasizing the family's lack of information, the allegedly dangerous nature of the facility he was held in, and the urgency with which Canada was demanding answers. Few mentioned his criminal history in the headline. Some buried it entirely. In this way, the media effectively scrubbed the narrative clean of any nuance, allowing the average reader to assume that a Canadian citizen had died at the hands of a callous American immigration system for no discernible reason. They banked on Canadians not reading the full story. 

This isn’t journalism. This is narrative engineering. And it is part of a broader trend that should concern anyone who values truth over clickbait, facts over outrage, and context over chaos.

It’s impossible to view this incident outside of its political context. Trump’s stance on immigration has always been a lightning rod. From his calls to build a wall along the Mexican border to his aggressive expansion of ICE authority during his first term, Trump’s policies have been relentlessly polarizing. As the media increasingly reorients itself not toward informing the public but toward producing emotion—preferably anger—stories like Noviello’s become useful tools.

Enter what can only be called rage farming. Rage farming is the practice of selectively presenting information—or withholding it entirely—to provoke outrage and engagement. It’s why the same article about Noviello can run two very different ways: one headline saying "Canadian drug trafficker dies in ICE custody" (factual but unlikely to spark widespread sympathy), and another saying "Canada demands answers after citizen dies in ICE custody" (vague and emotionally loaded). Guess which one gets more clicks, more shares, and more furious comments?

The latter, of course. Because modern media platforms don’t reward accuracy—they reward engagement. And engagement thrives on anger. Anger at the U.S. immigration system. Anger at Trump. Anger at conservatives. Anger at perceived inhumanity. The truth? That’s a secondary concern, if it’s considered at all.

The real headlines should have been: “Canadian drug trafficker dies in U.S. custody”.

But, none of this is new. Canadian outlets have long operated in a peculiar state of smug moral superiority when covering U.S. politics. Trump in particular is treated not as a foreign politician but as a domestic threat—despite not being on any Canadian ballot. Stories about American immigration, race relations, or policing are often used as proxy wars for Canadian identity crises, allowing our media class to wag fingers southward while ignoring our own rot at home.

What’s especially revealing is how this story intersects with another recent media narrative: growing Canadian anxiety over Trump’s renewed threats of tariffs and the floating of annexation rhetoric. As economic uncertainty and diplomatic tensions flare, Canadian media is more than willing to stoke nationalist fear and anger by pointing to any incident that paints Trump’s America as a menace to Canadian dignity. The death of a Canadian in ICE custody becomes just another spark to ignite a firestorm of anti-Trump sentiment, an emotional stand-in for trade anxiety and sovereignty fears. They’re drawing a direct line from a drug trafficker’s death to a broader ideological crusade, and they know it sells.

In Noviello’s case, this translated into a media blitz designed to whip up a sense of national grievance. There was less concern about the legality of his detention or the legitimacy of his conviction. Those were inconvenient details. What mattered was the opportunity to paint the U.S.—specifically the Trump-aligned parts of it—as brutal, unjust, and hostile to Canadians. It is ironic, then, that these same outlets often preach about the importance of facts and context in journalism. When those facts interfere with the desired emotional outcome, they vanish.

This kind of coverage has real-world consequences. It distorts public perception. It encourages policy responses based on hysteria rather than reason. And it undermines legitimate concerns—because make no mistake, there are real issues with ICE detention centres. There are real questions to be asked about how detainees are treated, how deaths are investigated, and how medical emergencies are handled. But when those legitimate issues are wrapped in a veil of half-truths and selective omissions, the credibility of the entire conversation collapses.

It’s also worth noting that not all Canadian deaths in foreign custody receive this level of attention. When Canadians die in custody in countries that are not politically useful to criticize—say, China or Iran—the coverage is more cautious, more limited, and less emotionally provocative. There are no month-long outrage cycles. There is no saturation of headlines. The difference? There’s no political advantage in criticizing those governments. But in criticizing Trump’s America, there is always political capital to be gained in Mark Carney's Canada.

This isn’t journalism serving democracy. It’s propaganda serving ideology.

We deserve better. Canadians deserve to know the full truth of what happened to Johnny Noviello—not just the sanitized, outrage-ready version. That means acknowledging that he was not an innocent man plucked off the street. He was a convicted drug trafficker detained under laws that have existed across multiple administrations, Republican and Democrat alike. It also means demanding transparency and accountability for the conditions that led to his death. It’s possible to do both. We can hold systems to account without whitewashing the people caught up in them. But that requires a commitment to truth, not just to narratives.

At the end of the day, Noviello’s death should prompt difficult questions. About detention conditions. About the balance of law enforcement and human rights. About how media shapes public understanding. But we should not allow his criminal past to be erased in the process, nor should we fall for a media apparatus that increasingly treats outrage as its product and the truth as its casualty. The public isn’t just being informed anymore—we’re being manipulated. And when even death becomes an opportunity to manufacture moral outrage at the expense of facts, we must ask ourselves: what else is being manipulated?