In news articles, they seem to go out of their way to not mention legal status of individuals or suspects in high profile crimes.
It's interesting you brought this up.
Several days ago the largest radio station on the west coast broke a news story regarding the individual that used his baby as a shield in a shootout with the police in Los Angeles recently. The baby was killed in the incident.
It was finally determined, or the information was finally released that found the suspect was indeed in this country illegally. This had been a leading story on the west coast for days, and still is.
Many were asking if this individual who it was discovered to be from El Salvador was in the country legally. After breaking the story, they continued leading the story for two hours, on at least two of the largest west cost radio stations.
Long story short, I posted under breaking news, this story titled, "Father of Baby Killed in shoot out was an Illegal Alien".
Within 5 minutes, the thread was pulled and deleted. There was a note left on the deleted thread saying, "post this on an existing thread".
My point is, this was clearly breaking news in the west, that followed a story that was leading the news every day for the past week, yet is was disregarded. I would have thought, if they felt is was not breaking they would have just put it in "news current events". Instead, it was completely removed.