A mother and two children drowned last week while trying to cross the Rio Grande from Mexico into Texas. Dozens of migrants die at the southern border each month without comment from the White House, but the Biden administration pounced, to use a favorite left-wing media word, on these deaths.
The Department of Homeland Security is locked in a dispute with Texas over a strip of land called Shelby Park, which lies along the Rio Grande near Eagle Pass. Border Patrol agents have been using the park as a staging area to hold migrants caught illegally crossing the border before releasing them into the United States.
Under orders from Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX), Texas National Guard soldiers have denied Border Patrol agents access to the park. The thinking is that if the Border Patrol cannot first process migrants, it cannot then release them into Texas. Running along the border, the park is state property.
With this conflict in mind, the Biden administration accused the Texas National Guard of denying Border Patrol agents access to migrants in distress in the Rio Grande, resulting in the deaths of the mother and her two children. Naturally, President Joe Biden’s housetrained media — including the Associated Press, CBS, NBC, and PBS — loved the story as fed to them and eagerly ate it up.
The problem is that it was fiction, as the Biden administration later admitted in federal court. Mexican officials didn’t notify the Border Patrol of the distressed migrants until 9 p.m. The mother and children were already dead by 8 p.m. There is nothing the Border Patrol could have done for them.
The same “news” outlets that so eagerly promoted the deaths of the migrants when they assumed the Texas National Guard was to blame quickly dropped the story when it became clear it was not true.
Their selective outrage is not new. In 2019, at the height of that year’s border crisis, left-wing news outlets promoted picture after graphic picture of a boy and his father who drowned crossing the Rio Grande. All the stories eagerly blamed then-President Donald Trump’s border policies for the deaths.
But by the time those deaths occurred, Trump had already instituted his “Remain in Mexico” policy, and illegal border crossings and deaths were rapidly falling. Migrant deaths on the border had risen from 281 in 2018 to 300 in 2019, but thanks to “Remain in Mexico,” they fell to 247 in 2020. The press did not think this success was worth reporting.
When Biden came to office, he undid “Remain in Mexico” and enacted a moratorium on all deportations. Southwest border encounters immediately spiked, and migrant deaths did, too. In 2021, 546 migrants were found dead on the border, more than double the number in Trump’s final year in office. Then, in 2022, migrant deaths rose to 853.
This time, with a death spike far higher than anything during the previous administration, the poodle news media are again silent. For Democrats and their media allies, migrant deaths don’t matter unless they promote the narrative that proper border enforcement is inhumane. Overwhelming evidence that lax border enforcement is far more deadly is ignored.
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It parallels the way Muslims killing Muslims in the Middle East is not treated as news worth reporting, but when Muslims are killed in the Israel-Hamas war launched against Israel by Hamas, it is reported massively if, again, tendentiously. Only some Muslim deaths seem to matter, and only some migrant border deaths matter. You can tell which ones by simply pondering whether the deaths can be blamed on conservatives or leftists.
Democrats and their media pat themselves on the back for supporting immigration policies that make it easier for migrants to enter the U.S. illegally, but they never admit the reality that they are bringing additional death and chaos.