The start of 2024 is just a few months away. It should not surprise anyone that mainstream media has already begun to make excuses for all the failures of Biden’s administration.
Among these failures, of course, is the border crisis. Joe Biden and Congressional Democrats have consistently received low marks on this issue. It will likely be one of the top five issues on which they will be evaluated when Americans go to the polls in the coming year.
Axios published a report on Tuesday in which they tried to confuse readers with the term “open border,” which is a term that both conservatives and Republicans use to describe Joe Biden’s border policy.
Russell Contreras of “Axios” Latino reported that the “open border myth” was a “myth”. He used the following reasoning to try to support the claim:
Reality Check: Since 1992, U.S. Border Patrol agents have quadrupled — from fewer than 5,000 in 1992 to more than 20,000 today.
Along the 1,951-mile border between Mexico and the United States, barriers, walls, and fences were erected, as well as new Border Patrol outposts. High-tech surveillance equipment was also installed.
Border Patrol arrests regularly break records at the border, showing the difficulty of entering the country without permission.
Biden has recently decided to proceed with the construction of a border wall along the South Texas coast.
The lines at the ports of entry are longer due to the new requirements for entering the U.S. This has led to increased pressure on the newer ports like Santa Teresa in New Mexico to extend their hours.
Contreras wrote, “Today GOP presidential candidates repeated the false claim that Biden supports open border,” Contreras also wrote. In his Twitter bio, Contreras describes himself as “a Race and Justice reporter.”
Bill Melugin of Fox News, a national correspondent who spent two years covering the border by air, land, and sea and often fact-checked Biden’s cabinet members and spokespeople, noted the biggest problem with his argument.
Melugin made his point in two tweets:
It’s so bad. This is so bad. You can tell that the person who wrote it hasn’t been to the border much or bothered to talk to the agents assigned to its patrol. You can ask the 1.6+ million known getaways about the difficulty of getting in with large sections of the border left unpatrolled as agents processed.
@RussContreras how do you write this ridiculous article without even speaking to anyone from Border Patrol, CBP, or DHS? Your only quote is from the Cato Institute, & you don’t even acknowledge Congressional testimony from Border Patrol leadership that the border is not secure.
Melugin then reported that CBP would be releasing border numbers in the next few days. According to his border patrol sources, “these numbers [for southern border] are expected to show nearly 270,000 encounters with migrants, the highest monthly encounter number ever recorded, and FY’23 will end with around 2.47 million encounters – a record again.”
Melugin’s Axios colleague Griff Jenkins also responded to the story.
The undisputed facts are that FY23 saw the most illegal border crossings in history. Visit the border
You’d expect Contreras to have some comments about his reporting being scrutinized by other media figures. He hasn’t been seen since he tweeted a link earlier Tuesday morning (after Melugin made his criticisms).
You can’t say I blamed him. If I had written something so wildly off-target, I would not want to be on social media very much either.
