Yesterday on Fox News' Your World, Neil Cavuto and Monica Crowley discussed an alleged drunken-driving incident in Virginia in which a Catholic nun was killed and two others were injured. Cavuto and Crowley were displeased that newspapers had not properly obsessed over the fact that the driver involved is an undocumented immigrant, which Crowley declared to be “the most consequential detail to the story.” Crowley used the incident to make the preposterous assertion that “most of the violent crime that we are seeing comes out of the illegal immigration community.”

“Most”? As in, “more than half”? That would be stunning, as a Department of Homeland Security report estimated that in 2009, 10.8 million undocumented immigrants were living in a nation of about 300 million people. That would mean that 3 or 4 percent of the population -- all of them undocumented immigrants -- is responsible for more than 50 percent of violent crimes.

Back here in reality, violent crime rates have remained the same or actually decreased in border states and most Arizona border towns, as Media Matters has noted several times. As for how much violent crime is committed by immigrants, even the Center for Immigration Studies, which says it has a “low-immigration vision,” concedes that given “the limitations of the data available, it is simply not possible to draw a clear conclusion about immigrants and crime.”

During the segment, Cavuto claimed that “we looked, Monica, I think conservatively, at about four dozen headlines. Not a one that we saw mentioned his immigration status.”

They must not have looked very hard. Here's a front-page article from the August 3 edition of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, the nuns' hometown newspaper:

Crowley replied to Cavuto's statement by saying, “I did the same thing. I looked at every possible headline, every possible story that was covered on this story, and not a single mention of the fact that he was an illegal immigrant.” Likewise, Cavuto had complained earlier that “if you look at the newspaper headlines, you'd never know that the guy was here illegally.” They both seemed determined to give the impression that print outlets are hiding the fact that the driver is an undocumented immigrant.

For example, Cavuto attacked The Washington Post for one of its articles about the story, which didn't mention the driver's immigration status in its headline. However, the second paragraph of the article did:

An alleged drunk driver involved in a crash Sunday morning that killed a Catholic nun in Prince William County and left two other nuns gravely injured has a record of numerous motor vehicle violations in recent years, including two drunken-driving cases for which he served 20 days in jail, according to authorities and court records.

The suspect, Carlos A. Martinelly Montano, 23, an illegal immigrant from Bolivia, was also detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement after a drunken-driving arrest in 2008. Montano was released on his own recognizance pending a deportation hearing, which has yet to occur because of a backlog, said ICE spokeswoman Cori Bassett.

As for other print outlets, the Associated Press' headline for its article was “Police: Illegal immigrant crashes, killing Va. Nun.” That story, incidentally, can be found on the Washington Post website. The AP story, bearing the same headline or a very similar one, is on the website of many newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, The Seattle Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Sun-Times, The Salt Lake Tribune, and the Miami Herald.

The Your World segment is actually quite sad, given that nuns in the victims' religious order have spoken out against such coverage of the incident. An August 3 Washington Post article reported:

The religious order that was home to three nuns whose car was hit Sunday morning by an alleged drunk driver in Northern Virginia said it is upset at what it views as the politicization of the incident.

Sister Glenna Smith, a spokeswoman for the Benedictine Sisters, said Tuesday that “we are dismayed” by reports that the crash, which killed one woman and critically injured two others, is focusing attention on the man's status as an alleged illegal immigrant. Critics of federal immigration policy have seized on the crash.

“The fact the he had DUIs is really poignant, but he's a child of God and deserves to be treated with dignity,” Smith said of the driver, Carlos A. Martinelly Montano. “I don't want to make a pro- or anti-immigrant statement but simply a point that he is an individual human person and we will be approaching him with mercy. Denise, of all us, would be the first to offer forgiveness.”