In May 2021, the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) reported that over 180,000 people had tried to illegally enter the U.S. at the U.S.-Mexico border, the largest single-month tally of illegal crossings in the southwest in recent history. May’s monthly total comes on the heels of over 500,000 crossings in the first four months of Joe Biden’s presidency. To most political observers, this didn’t come as a surprise. Joe Biden’s open-borders policy was well known, especially beyond our borders. So, where is the media in all of this?
The Biden Administration continues to be treated with kid gloves by a complacent mainstream media that is going to great lengths to help the White House manage the public relations disaster that is, in reality, a humanitarian crisis sparked by the very administration that is now neglecting to deal with the problem.
Take, for example, NBC Nightly News anchor Lestor Holt’s June 7, 2021 interview with Vice President Kamala Harris in Guatemala on the mass central American migration to the U.S.-Mexico border. In what should have the most tee-ball of interviews for the Vice President, she came off confused and defensive. When asked about it by Holt and her and Biden’s refusal to visit the border, Haris said, “We’ve been to the border.” Holt pressed her, “You haven’t been to the border,” he said. “And I haven’t been to Europe, Harris quipped. Vice President Harris would eventually visit the U.S.-Mexico border two weeks later following repeated calls from the right and the left.
“Somebody needs to listen to our local communities. With all due respect, just coming and doing a staged visit is not enough,” Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX) told MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe’ last month. “We’ve got to enforce the law, and part of the laws that we have is deport the people that don’t have a right to be here in the United States. It’s just plain and simple,” Cuellar said.
Missing from the mainstream media’s narrative are a few key perspectives. First, Republicans had rightly sounded the alarm of an impending border crisis should Joe Biden win the presidency. When Biden announced his reversals of President Trump’s immigration policies, or intentions thereof, all throughout the campaign and even after border crossings significantly upticked in February, the MSM ignored the fact that Biden had rushed his executive actions and other immigration policies without first assessing the situation and making an informed decision.
Second, the signs of the humanitarian disaster on America’s southern border began to reveal themselves in February and were clear in March. So why did it take until June for NBC news and outlets other than Fox News to cover the border crisis?
To be fair, Fox News has done an excellent job to provide accurate reporting of the Biden border crisis as well as the Democrats’ intransigence.
Whether intentional or not, Americans will be the judge. It is not without a sense of irony that liberals regard conservatives these days as unwitting, brainwashed, or unafraid to ask questions. We face it all the time. Yet when conservatives show skepticism of the mainstream media’s narrative, liberals dismiss it as an attack on the press when the reality is liberals want Americans to display skepticism only where they say you should. That’s not free speech or free press.