Better (very) late than never? New York Times reporter Christopher Flavelle issued an exhaustive chronological rundown, sympathetic but still damning, of former President Joe Biden’s politically disastrous immigration policy, a dangerous mix of amnesty activism and passivity.
The Sunday front-page headline introducing the whopping 4,000-word story: “Inside Biden’s Losing Bets on Immigration -- Not Heeding Warnings, and Giving Trump an Opening.”
A shame then that the Times has spent years defending loose immigration policy while sliming Republican enforcement of immigration law in general, and accusing Trump’s more assertive enforcement of being rooted in violent nativism and racism.
In the weeks after Joseph R. Biden Jr. was elected president, advisers delivered a warning: His approach to immigration could prove disastrous.
Mr. Biden had pledged to treat unauthorized immigrants more humanely than President Donald J. Trump, who generated widespread backlash by separating migrant children from their parents.
But Mr. Biden was now president-elect, and his positions threatened to drastically increase border crossings, experts advising his transition team warned in a Zoom briefing in the final weeks of 2020, according to people with direct knowledge of that briefing. That jump, they said, could provoke a political crisis.
It eventually did, with no help from the Times. Flavelle provided the gory details.
Soon after being sworn in, Mr. Biden issued a 100-day pause on deportations. He drastically narrowed the categories of unauthorized immigrants targeted for arrest. He directed his government to stop building the border wall, a centerpiece of Mr. Trump’s agenda. He suspended Remain in Mexico. He sent draft legislation to Congress to create a citizenship pathway for people in the country illegally. He kept Title 42 in place, but stopped using it to turn back children who crossed the border alone.
The Times was supportive of Title 42 in 2022, dropping its omnipresent COVID paranoia and even making conservative-sounding arguments in favor of loosening protective measures – in the name of keeping the borders open.
By the halfway mark of Mr. Biden’s term, the failure of his approach was impossible to ignore.
The Border Patrol reported 2.2 million apprehensions along the Mexican border the previous year, up from 400,000 the year Mr. Biden was elected….
Flavelle raised a conservative point that surely made some Times readers spit out their matcha.
Less than three weeks after the Senate deal collapsed, a 22-year-old nursing student, Laken Riley, was killed on the University of Georgia campus. When a Venezuelan man who had entered the country illegally was charged with the murder, her death became shorthand for Democrats’ failures. Mr. Trump met with Ms. Riley’s family and said that she would still be alive “if Joe Biden had not willfully and maliciously eviscerated the borders.”
The conclusion was damning:
Why Mr. Biden waited so long to effectively seal the border has become one of the defining questions of his presidency.
Flavelle’s analysis topples several pillars of the paper’s pro-amnesty, porous-border philosophy. Pushing amnesty for illegal immigrants has been a long-term New York Times obsession, an issue where its liberal bias shows through the clearest. The paper has pushed initiatives like President Barack Obama’s plan to keep illegal young "Dreamers" in the country, including stories like this from 2017: “Program That Lifted 800,000 Immigrant ‘Dreamers’ Is at Risk.”
Before Trump’s shocking win over Hillary Clinton in 2016, the Times pressed Trump to knuckle under on the issue that would eventually win him two terms: “Donald J. Trump faced a backlash on Thursday from some of his top conservative Hispanic supporters, who said their hopes that he was softening his immigration policy had been dashed by his fiery speech Wednesday night, which they said was anti-immigrant.”
In June 2019, the paper ran an online op-ed that actually advocated doxxing -- revealing personal information on private citizens for the purpose of targeted harassment -- against migrant detention center employees in an online op-ed for the Times.
The paper even had the nerve in January 2024 to blame Trump and the GOP for Biden’s border crisis, with Trump having “all but killed the prospects for a bipartisan border deal,” ignoring that then-President Biden had the executive powers to toughen the borders on his own.
The Times hated Trump using the word “invasion” to describe the invasion of illegal immigrants across the southern border in April 2024, to the point of blaming deadly domestic terrorist attacks on the president’s rhetoric: “Historians and analysts who study political rhetoric have long warned that the term dehumanizes those to whom it refers and could stoke violence, noting that it appeared in writings by perpetrators of deadly mass shootings in Pittsburgh, Pa.; El Paso, Texas; and Buffalo, N.Y., in recent years.”
Why the Times’ turnabout? Perhaps guilt for also giving in to left-wing pressure to not raise the issue during the 2024 campaign, resulting in lulling its favored party, the Democrats, into a false sense of political security?
