Biden's Immigration Debacle Is the Media's, Too

Daniel McCarthy
Mon, 08 Dec 2025 16:15:36 -0800
Opinion

The New York Times has invented a new genre of reporting — covering big stories showing Democrats in a bad light years after the events that matter.

At the tail end of 2025, the Times has freshly broken the news that the Biden administration flooded the country with illegal immigrants, partly for ideological and partisan reasons, partly out of sheer incompetence.

Who knew?
Updated: Mon Dec 08, 2025

The New York Times has invented a new genre of reporting — covering big stories showing Democrats in a bad light years after the events that matter.

At the tail end of 2025, the Times has freshly broken the news that the Biden administration flooded the country with illegal immigrants, partly for ideological and partisan reasons, partly out of sheer incompetence.

Who knew?

The nearly 4,000-word A1 story by Christopher Flavelle, with 14 colleagues contributing additional reporting and research, is certainly well sourced, but none of its sources have just come to light.

It dissects Biden's immigration misdeeds and missteps over each of his four years in office.

Great — but why not do that while the guy's actually in power?

Immigration isn't suddenly an issue today. It's been the biggest domestic story since COVID ended.

And even before COVID, going all the way back to 2016, Donald Trump put immigration at the forefront of presidential politics.

In private, Democrats close to Biden were discussing the crisis all along and knew his agenda would only make it worse.

"Mr. Biden's policy advisers sounded the alarm before he even won the election," the Times acknowledges. "In August of 2020, several aides wrote a memo cautioning Mr. Biden's inner circle that his promises" of lighter immigration enforcement "coupled with pent-up demand from the Trump years and economic hardship from Covid ... could provoke a spike in border crossings."

Democrats were fully aware of what they were getting the country into, and they did it anyway.

Their voters didn't know, however, because the media didn't do the unflinching reporting necessary to inform them — not until just now.

This is the Biden senility story all over again.

Even when the president was visibly failing, liberals in the media dismissed what was right before their eyes.

A friend who was a lonely conservative columnist at another of the nation's major metropolitan newspapers told me the one subject he was explicitly forbidden to write about was Biden's age and infirmity.

This code of silence has backfired spectacularly, saddling the Democrats with not one but two unelectable candidates at the top of their presidential ticket last year, and leaving the left in a state of shock that Americans really did figure out what was happening with immigration and really were mad about it.

Better late than never, though?

"How Biden Ignored Warnings and Lost Americans' Faith in Immigration" does teach an important lesson beyond the one about what happens when radical policies go uncriticized by the media and internal criticisms by sane Democrats get ignored.

It also showcases the success of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott's strategy of busing the border crisis straight into blue cities.

Democrats throughout the country could ignore the consequences of mass migration as long as the brunt of its impact was taken by Texas and other border states.

Texas is deep red, after all — and more poor migrants could only help turn the state blue over generations, potentially tipping the Electoral College permanently to the Democrats.

Abbott short-circuited that design by putting illegal immigrants on buses and sending them to blue cities throughout the country: Denver, Philadelphia, Washington, New York.

Tens of thousands of illegal immigrants poured into Democratic cities that thought the border emergency was somebody else's problem.

It was a winning move:

"Many Biden officials came to view Mr. Abbott's campaign as the point Democrats lost the debate," the Times notes — and quotes Biden's former assistant director for policy at ICE, Deborah Fleischaker, saying, "I don't think we ever recovered."

Now the journalistic profession has to ask whether it can recover from postgame coverage that should have been deeper reporting on these events while they were happening.

Biden's decrepitude and the calamitous consequences of his immigration policies — ultimately for Democrats themselves as well as the country — aren't the only scandals conservative media have been sounding the alarm about for years that haven't received the kind of deep and critical coverage they deserve from all major media, even those that tilt left.

Just imagine The New York Times taking a look this close at climate-change alarmism and discovering the world isn't coming to a fiery end any time soon.

It would be a revolution in media credibility, but for now you can still expect only the news that's fit to print long after liberal follies have become too obvious to ignore.