NPR Gets It Right after Helping White House Get It Wrong

By Jerry Kammer on June 12, 2014

NPR reporter John Burnett this morning helped correct a record that has been distorted in many news accounts about the ongoing surge of illegal immigration from Central America.

"The Border Patrol has in recent months been overwhelmed by a wave of poor migrants, some of them unaccompanied children as young as six," Burnett reported.

If you listened to NPR over the past week, you would have thought the influx comprised only children — youngsters as young as six who make the dangerous journey in a heart-wrenching search for parents already in the United States. While NPR wasn't the only news organization to frame the story this way, it was perhaps the most prominent in the distortion, especially in the descriptions provided by its anchors in Washington as they introduced stories and interviewed reporters in the field.

That oversimplification unwittingly serves the purposes of the White House, which has been pumping out the same misleading line. Officials there drew the ire of frustrated reporters earlier this week when they insisted that they not be identified as they continued to misrepresent the crisis as entirely about children. Masters of manipulation, they hid behind a wall.

DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson, who is expected to follow the White House line, has performed like the loyal soldier that he is. Yesterday his public affairs office — notorious among Border Patrol agents for putting a stranglehold on information from the field — put out a press release with this headline: "SECRETARY JOHNSON TO PARTICIPATE IN A MEDIA AVAILABILITY ON INFLUX OF UNACCOMPANIED CHILDREN AT THE BORDER".

At the Center for Immigration Studies, we have been hearing from Border Patrol agents and other government employees distraught at the situation at the border. Their hearts go out to the children, whose suffering they are trying to alleviate, along with the suffering of the many adults they take into custody. But they are also furious at what they see as the failure of this White House either to acknowledge the dimensions of the crisis or to take credible action to block the influx and stop the chaos and suffering.

That frustration was given powerful expression in a May 30 memo from Deputy Border Patrol Chief Ron Vitiello that became public last week.

If the U.S government fails to deliver adequate consequences to deter aliens from attempting to illegally enter the United States, the result will be an even greater increase in the rate of recidivism and first-time illicit entries. Releasing Other-Than-Mexican family units, [people who present] credible fear claims, and low-threat aliens on their own recognizance, along with facilitating family reunification of unaccompanied alien children in lieu of repatriation to their country of citizenship, serve as incentives for additional individuals to follow the same path. ... To stem the flow, adequate consequences must be delivered for illegal entry into the United States and for facilitating human smuggling."