The New York Times recently published an op-ed under the headline, “I was one of Biden’s advisers. Here’s how to fix our immigration system.” Mockery came quickly and was deserved. “I was captain of the Titanic. Here’s how to avoid icebergs,” one X account responded. “I was in charge of Chernobyl. Here’s how to operate a nuclear power plant,” another said.
But Blas Nunez-Neto’s motive for writing the op-ed and the New York Times‘s decision to publish it are no small matters. In the months since President Donald Trump’s reelection, the Democratic Party has proved itself incapable of moderating its extreme position on immigration. It has indeed become more extreme. The open-borders policies of the Biden administration will be the open-borders policies of the next Democratic Party presidential nominee. If anything, they will be even further to the left.
But because the Democrats will not change their immigration policy, they have to do something else to change public perception of it, and that means they need to change the narrative about it. And there is no better institution able and eager to help Democrats rewrite history and replace it with a false account than the New York Times.
Nunez-Neto’s op-ed begins by acknowledging the Democratic Party’s failure to admit that a border crisis “cost [it] a great deal of trust with American voters and contributed to President Trump’s return to the White House.”
This is true, but Nunez-Neto tries to limit former President Joe Biden’s culpability, blaming “the global economic devastation caused by Covid-19, adverse court decisions that delayed the end of a pandemic-era health rule, a lack of resources to adequately secure the border, and the inability to deport people to countries like Venezuela.”
Of these purported causes, only Venezuela’s intransigence is remotely true. And Biden’s authority to pressure Venezuela or third countries to take Venezuelan migrants is not mentioned. Blaming courts is rich, for those decisions forced Biden to maintain stricter immigration enforcement when he was trying to let more migrants in.
The only Biden policy criticized by Nunez-Neto is his 100-day pause on deportations. However, as its name makes it plain, this only lasted 100 days, but the border crisis lasted much longer. Biden’s decision to end Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, his decision not to apply Title 42 border entry denials to families with children, and his Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportation deprioritization memos all go unmentioned. There is no reckoning with the real damage caused by Biden’s policies here.
Next, Nunez-Neto peddles the tale that Biden’s June 2024 executive order modifying how illegal immigrants were processed at the southern border solved the crisis, leading to the lowest number of illegal entries since Trump’s first term in office. But a quick look at data from Customs and Border Protection Southwest Land Board Encounters exposes this argument as a fraud. Illegal crossings peaked in December 2023 at a record 301,981. By the time Biden issued his executive order in June, they were already down to 130,415. Unless Biden invented time travel, his June executive order could not have been responsible for cutting illegal entries during the previous six months.
What happened in 2024 was that Biden cut a secret deal in January with former Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador in which our southern neighbor agreed to cut the number of “humanitarian visas” it granted migrants traveling to the United States, and to start busing them south from the U.S. border. Mexico agreed to this in exchange for the U.S. not changing immigration policy until after Obrador’s party won the June election. Getting Mexico to step up immigration enforcement is also how former President Barack Obama eventually solved the 2014 border crisis.
With this fictional narrative in place, Nunez-Neto admonishes Congress for not passing the “tough bipartisan” legislation negotiated by former Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas with Sen. James Lankford (R-OK). There was nothing tough about it. It contained none of the immigration provisions passed by House Republicans in 2023. All it did was codify Biden’s catch-and-release policies, which is what the next Democratic president will attempt to do.
The Department of Homeland Security released June border numbers this week. They showed just 9,306 illegal immigrants encountered at the southern border, an all-time low. Trump has proved that no new legislation was needed to secure the border. All it took was competent and determined executive leadership to enforce existing law.
If a Democrat is elected in 2028, they will swiftly dismantle Trump’s immigration law enforcement infrastructure and return to Biden’s catch-and-release policies. Nunez-Neto’s op-ed is just one more step in that direction.
A PIVOT POINT ON SPENDING IN THE SENATE
It is a deceptive account of what happened. That, indeed, is the point of his writing it. It is intended to whitewash the Democrats’ abject failure on immigration. That, too, is why the New York Times was happy to publish it. The outlet is a tendentious handmaiden of the left-wing party. Its left-wing readers want to be lied to, and it is happy to oblige. It hopes that as the Biden maladministration fades into the past, other voters will also gradually forget how bad it was and be persuaded by such fictions as Nunez-Neto’s op-ed to reconsider their mistrust of the Democrats on this matter.
Now that Trump has succeeded in securing the southern border, illegal immigration has faded as a crisis matter. Democrats have also demagogued mass deportations and have pushed Trump’s favorability on the matter downward. But the Biden administration has-beens and left-wing legacy media should not be allowed to get away with their rewrite of history. Voters were once bitten, and would be advised to remain twice shy.