Border Crisis: What Happened to Prime-Time Coverage of the Southern Border?

President Biden and members of his administration are knowingly making false statements about the rampant illegal immigration taking place along the U.S.-Mexico border as the problem continues to get much worse.

Take, for example, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas who told a Congressional panel last year that he still believes that America’s southern border is secure, saying in response to a question about his confidence, “Yes, and we are working day in and day out to enhance security,” Fox News reported. Then there is Vice President Kamala Harris, the White House’s anointed ‘Border Czar,’ who told NBC News’ Chuck Todd that “the border is secure,” as Todd tried desperately to keep from smiling in disbelief. 

So what happened to prime-time coverage of the humanitarian disaster unfolding at the Southern Border? Does the woke liberal media care about the coyotes who prey on poor, defenseless families to smuggle them to the land of the free, or do they do an exposé about the human traffickers taking kidnapped Central American daughters into the international sex trade? We’ve come to expect that some of our politicians will lie every once in a while, Democrats more often than not. When that happens, the media, in theory, is supposed to be there to check them, playing the role of a citizen watchdog with the public’s interest at heart. Sounds like a wonderful system. But the reality, unfortunately, is quite different.

Mark Morgan, a visiting fellow in the Border Security and Immigration Center at The Heritage Foundation and the former Acting Commissioner of the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) from 2019-2021, recently wrote, “For the most part, however, the media has not only largely ignored the border crisis, but has actively participated in the left’s campaign to mislead and deceive Americans about the scope, scale, and causes of the crisis.”

In 2021-2022, the CBP reported over 2 million known apprehensions along the U.S.-Mexico border, the largest number since the bureau started keeping statistics. What is equally frightening is hearing liberal pundits, woke journalists, and media elitists try to lay the blame of the current crisis at the feet of former President Donald Trump, who during his tenure actually had the lowest number of CBP border apprehensions in recorded history – before the pandemic ever began. Those frail-mannered writers perched in their glass covered, air-conditioned towers are either uneducated about the facts, in which case they are terrible researchers and thus terrible writers, intentionally misleading their readership, or worse, knowingly lying about the desperate situation experienced by millions of people.

Border apprehensions are an important statistic and forecasting barometer for the magnitude of the situation, which is clearly beyond crisis level today. However, the real statistic that Morgan and few others dare to state is that, in addition to the 2 million border apprehensions that we know about, there were approximately 1 million “got aways,” people who we know successfully crossed the border into the U.S. last year alone. Those are folks who were seen on camera, sensors and even witnessed by border agents but never caught. On top of that, there are the unknown “got aways,” people who slipped through undetected, which is statistically one or two times as many as the known “got aways.” That equates to roughly 1-2 million more illegal immigrants living in the U.S. on President Biden’s watch in just two short years.

Some writers on the left think they are being clever and can distract readers away from the truth using shiny numbers. For example, sometimes writers on the left will try to downplay the number of crossings by claiming that many of the people are repeat offenders, that is people who were previously apprehended, turned away back into Mexico, and got caught trying to enter again, some 5 or 6 times. The problem with that trickery is the fact that, regardless of the number of times a person tries to cross, each time they get apprehended, that is law enforcement time, energy, and resources spent away from other methods of securing our border, like going after the bad guys bringing fentanyl onto the American streets, instead of sitting in a facility processing the same guy that was processed 4 months ago.

In his stinging rebuke of the liberal media’s coverage of the crisis at the southern border, if you could even call it that, Commissioner Morgan cites a handful of all conservative writers who aren’t afraid to speak the truth about the death and destruction being watched over, processed or unaccounted for with American taxpayer dollars. At the same time, his point concludes with what can only be called journalistic malpractice by the left’s media empires.

Morgan concludes his thoughts with genuineness and candor, saying, “One has to ask to all this dishonesty: Why?” He goes on,”Why are so many in corporate media not only ignoring the crisis, but actively trying to deceive Americans when they do cover it? How did this piece make it past an editor?”

More and more Americans are coming to terms with the liberal media’s agenda when it comes to coverage of the crisis on our southern border. We are seeing past the falsehoods, misleading statistics, and blame shift that arrogant globalists write as if they know what is best for America. This is the behavior of an industry in decline, in power, size, and influence, as reflected by Americans’ growing distrust of the liberal mainstream media. You would think they would learn, but it appears that advertorials posing as investigative journalism is too profitable not to continue.

Bob Carlstrom is President of AMAC Action.