You wouldn’t know it from corporate media coverage of President Joe Biden’s border crisis, but U.S. Customs and Border Protection arrested yet another historic high in illegal Southern border crossers, 154,998 in February. This means another historically high number also likely evaded Border Patrol and arrived inside the United States illegally, with authorities having no knowledge of who they are.
The number of border arrests may be down more than 11,000 from February 2022, but, historically speaking, it’s far higher than the number of arrests recorded in 21 of the past 23 years. Outside of 2022, there haven’t been this many arrests in the month of February since the CBP began recording apprehension data in 2000.
Not only are border arrests up from past years, so are detainments of illegal crossers who appear on the FBI’s terror watchlist. Only eight of the people on the terror watch list were arrested trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border between fiscal years 2017 and 2020. In fiscal year 2022, that jumped to 98, a number that is expected to be overshadowed by the end of this fiscal year.
In addition, Biden’s expansion of “humanitarian parole” grants a loophole “legal” status to intended illegal border crossers from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. That means, as border expert Todd Bensman explains, the Biden administration is putting these migrants into a different category to hide the true numbers of people illegally crossing into the United States.
By all measures, catching and likely releasing the 155,000 of the millions of people illegally crossing into the United States. each year is nothing to be celebrated. Yet corporate media predictably flooded front pages with headlines featuring the “sharp drop in illegal border crossings” in February.
Outlets like the Associated Press, amplified by NBC, and CBS celebrated the “two-year low” as a success for Biden who ignored the border crisis for two years before recently debuting some ill-named “enforcement” policies that won’t stop the flood of illegal migration.
“For the first time since Mr. Biden took office, Border Patrol agents did not record a spike in migrant apprehensions in the month of February, when migration flows to the U.S. southern border have typically increased before peaking in the spring,” CBS cheered.
The Washington Post took it one step further when it lamented that Biden, who is finally facing some semblance of accountability from the House GOP for causing the largest border crisis in U.S. history, is taking “heat” at the same time “illegal crossings are down.”
“The figures provide a boost to Biden administration officials at a time when their border measures are facing court challenges and scalding criticism from Republicans and Democrats,” WaPo claimed.
Only one of the media mouthpieces, WaPo, mentioned the rise in groups designed to overwhelm border agents. The article’s penultimate sentence characterized the violent bridge attack at the El Paso border last week as “hundreds of migrants crowded onto the bridge connecting Mexico’s Ciudad Juárez with El Paso, pleading with authorities to allow them to pass.”
None of the outlets bothered to mention that northern illegal border crossings are also ramping up under Democrats’ refusal to enforce U.S. national security laws.
Instead, the White House newsrooms focused on scrutinizing House Republicans for “ignoring the reductions of the past two months” to take turns excoriating the administration for the record migration influx during Biden’s first two years in office. Democrats refused to cooperate and the Department of Homeland Security’s attempted to keep CBP officials from testifying.
