Here's a small word worth watching in Fox News headlines: "claims." Six letters, and a statement starts to look like a maybe. * Tuesday's headline: "Washington Democrat claims majority of recent DHS arrestees posed 'no threat to public safety'." The Democrat is Rep. Pramila Jayapal. At a House hearing, she said most people arrested by immigration agents this summer "pose absolutely no threat to public safety." Her office had already put it in numbers on September 1: citing ICE data, it said most people arrested have no criminal charges or convictions. "No threat" is her political spin on that, and it's fair to flag spin. * But the number underneath isn't a claim. It's in the government's own data. On August 27, The New York Times went through federal arrest records and found that a majority of people ICE arrested in July had never been charged with or convicted of a crime. Fewer than 4% had a violent conviction. The Washington Post reported the same trend the next day. * And here's the funny part: Fox knows. Halfway down its own story, Fox writes that independent analyses of ICE data found the share of people arrested with no convictions or charges went up. So the headline puts a question mark over a trend that the article itself backs up further down. Even the browser tab on Fox's page says "Jayapal says." Only the big headline says "claims." * Then the story hands the rest of its space to the government. The homeland security secretary gets a long quote about record arrests and "promises made and promises kept." Nobody who was arrested, and nobody who knows one of them, gets a line. * This isn't new at Fox. When the arrest totals were the news, Fox wrote them up like a sports record: "ICE's biggest arrest month in agency history" on August 3, and "jaw dropping" numbers in an August 24 "FIRST ON FOX" story. The totals were treated as a record to celebrate. A Democrat pointing at who is inside those totals got a "claims." * Think about who those people are. The Times found spouses of US citizens and people with pending asylum cases among them. Or, in Jayapal's words, "parents, longtime friends, neighbors." * In our view, a newsroom can cheer tough enforcement if it likes. But when the government's own data backs up the core of what a Democrat said, the headline shouldn't turn it into a he-said-she-said.