National Review, December 10, 2025
News flash: The Biden administration was responsible for the border crisis.
Of course, this isn’t news — except to readers of the New York Times. It took the sleuthing of fully 15 New York Times reporters to belatedly uncover this curious fact, describing for their no doubt bewildered readers “How Biden Ignored Warnings and Lost Americans’ Faith in Immigration.”
What’s next — Covid-19 came from a Chinese lab? Russia didn’t manipulate the 2016 election?
My sarcasm is especially warranted because Todd Bensman, formerly on my staff and now at DHS, published a whole book on this nearly two years ago, whose title would have made a better headline for the Times story: Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History.
As for the Times story itself, one thing that jumps out is the absence of the words “Alejandro Mayorkas,” Biden’s DHS secretary who was impeached precisely for his role in causing the border crisis. This leads me to suspect that he may have been one of the main sources for the tick-tock of administration deliberations, in a vain attempt to exonerate himself in the eyes of his fellows for his central role in sending Trump back to the White House.
An unintentionally hilarious nugget from the Times piece: “By the halfway mark of Mr. Biden’s term, the failure of his approach was impossible to ignore.” WTF? Bensman talked to a rank-and-file alien smuggler on the Mexican side of the border in April 2021, who offhandedly referred to Biden’s rhetoric and policies as “la invitación” — the invitation to cross the border. Even by the “impossible to ignore” standard, you would think the thousands of Haitian illegals camped under the bridge in the Texas border town of Del Rio would qualify — in September 2021.
Obviously, this wasn’t addressed forthrightly at the time by the Times and other stenographers for the Biden administration because to do so would have validated the reporting by Fox (and CIS) and helped Republicans. And the imperative to run cover for their party is still present in the article. For instance, in referring to the unlawful CHNV program, the article observes, “Republicans accused the administration of letting in unauthorized immigrants.” Accused? The administration itself justified the program as a way of “letting in unauthorized immigrants” from four countries to fly directly into the country instead of crossing the border.
The pro-Biden cope continues in the article’s discussion of the misbegotten Lankford bill, pitched by the Democrats and Senator James Lankford (R., Hapless) as the only way to control the border. The bill, which in addition to a few useful provisions would have codified Mayorkas’s illegal border policies, was described like this:
The bill could have provided what Mr. Biden needed as he ran for re-election: a drop in border crossings, blessed by both parties in Congress, with enough time before Election Day for voters to change their minds about Democrats supporting open borders.
The problem was, in this telling, that the White House didn’t get involved soon enough, because by the time it did, Trump had the nomination locked up and was in a position to kill the bill. Actually, because of its inherent flaws, the bill was dead before Trump had even heard of it, and in any case DeSantis would have been as opposed to it as Trump.
In the event, we didn’t need a new law, just a new president — a development the New York Times itself helped bring about by refusing to write this story four years ago, when the Biden crowd might have been compelled to change course.