After helping to force President Joe Biden out of the 2024 presidential race, the corporate media and the Democratic Party are now working overtime to reframe the optics of the administration’s handling of the border.
A recent report from Politico attempted to convince readers that the Biden-Harris administration was more tough on the border than former President Donald Trump. The article claimed that Trump had a “hard time” removing more illegal aliens than Biden.
‘Now that the status of our southern border has proven embarrassing and unpopular, Democrats are trying to spin the numbers.’
“Even as Trump slams the president for open borders, the Biden-Harris administration has kicked out far more immigrants than Trump ever managed to,” Politico reported.
The news outlet proceeded to compare Title 42 expulsions under the two administrations.
Title 42, which was enacted by Trump and went into effect in March 2020, allowed the federal government to expeditiously deport illegal immigrants arriving at the southern border who had recently been in a country where COVID-19 was present. While the Biden administration undid much of Trump’s border restrictions, it kept Title 42 until May 2023.
Politico reported that Biden used the program to expel more illegal immigrants than Trump’s administration. However, buried deep in the article, the news outlet acknowledged that Trump executed far more Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportations compared to the current administration.
The National Immigration Center for Enforcement reported that under Trump, there were just over 3 million illegal alien encounters, versus more than 9 million under Biden’s leadership. Trump used ICE to remove 31.1% of those illegal immigrants, while Biden only removed 4.4%.
Politico reported that part of the reason that Biden did not have ICE carry out more removal proceedings was that the southern border was so overwhelmed with illegal aliens seeking asylum that the administration was more or less forced to reallocate the agency’s resources to assist Customs and Border Protection at the U.S.-Mexico border and away from interior arrests.
Since 2021, the CBP has reported more than 10 million nationwide encounters. The agency’s statistics do not include known or unknown gotaways who were not apprehended by law enforcement officials before entering the country’s interior.
Former Trump White House official Theo Wold told Blaze News, “Under Kamala Harris’s border policies, record numbers of aliens entered the country illegally, while ICE deported only a small fraction of the deportations conducted under Trump.”
“Now that the status of our southern border has proven embarrassing and unpopular, Democrats are trying to spin the numbers. But the numbers don’t lie,” Wold continued. “With Harris in charge of immigration policy, deportations don’t happen — illegal aliens enter and just stay. And American citizens, like Laken Riley and Jocelyn Nungaray, suffer.”
The corporate media has also been trying to erase evidence that Vice President Kamala Harris was ever labeled the “border czar” in an effort to create some distance between her presidential campaign and Biden’s disastrous handling of the illegal immigration crisis. Axios attempted to slam Trump and Republicans for “repeatedly” using the title to refer to Harris, but the publication was quickly corrected by X’s Community Notes, which pointed out that Axios itself used the term several times in 2021.
The media aided in Biden-Harris’ mission to make its recent border executive order appear tough on illegal immigration by providing surface-level reporting that the administration would shut down the southern border when encounters reached 2,500 per day for seven consecutive days. However, the media often failed to mention the order’s lengthy list of exceptions, including that the administration would still allow illegal aliens to enter the country if they made an appointment at a port of entry through the CBP One application.
Department of Homeland Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas attempted some sleight of hand to brand the executive action as both a crackdown on illegal crossings and a gesture of compassion toward asylum seekers. During an interview, he noted that the shutdown order — if and when enforced — would impact only illegal aliens attempting to enter “in between ports of entry.” He also applauded the Biden-Harris administration for building additional “lawful pathways” for illegal immigrants wishing to claim asylum.
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