The puke funnel

The cable-news-dominating fake story that there is some kind of new and unprecedented “crisis” at the border has its roots not only in Fox News but from the Trump administration’s pointman on white supremacy:

No one has been more committed to the “border crisis” framing than Fox News, though; according to the Nexis database, Fox has used the term at least 78 times since inauguration. In fact, the first mention by any major national publication or network of an urgent, Biden-specific crisis appears to have taken place Jan. 21, one whole day after the new president had taken the oath of office, on Fox personality Laura Ingraham’s prime-time show. One of the experts Ingraham put forth to confirm the crisis’s existence was Stephen Miller, the senior Trump adviser with well–documented intellectual roots in the community of nationalists who advocate strict immigration laws because they believe that the U.S. should be a white-controlled country; Miller was responsible for creating and/or pushing through Trump’s most notorious border policies, including the “zero tolerance” initiative to separate parents from their young children. Ingraham’s other guest was Mark Morgan, who served as the acting director of both Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection under Trump. The message of their segment was that Biden, by moving to halt deportations during a review of immigration policy, was encouraging and attracting violent criminals…

…Miller and Morgan not only identified the existence of a new crisis but named its cause: Biden’s initial moves to roll back their (unpopular) policies.

According to CBP’s own data, though, year-over-year apprehensions began rising in August 2020, when Trump was still president, and had increased significantly before votes were counted in November. (In October 2020, there were 71,946 reported apprehensions; in October 2018, there were 60,781.) An op-ed published Monday by analysts at the Migration Policy Institute cites data from 2020 and January 2021 that indicates a high portion of attempted crossings were being made by individual adults who’d already tried to cross before and been expelled—individuals who had, therefore, already decided to make a journey north well before Biden won the election. (The op-ed’s writers also note that Central America was hit hard in November by two hurricanes, which may have triggered migration that was unrelated to domestic U.S. politics.) And a Washington Post op-ed published Tuesday by authors from the U.S. Immigration Policy Center observes that if you add 2019’s numbers to the pandemic-related numerical drop in documented crossings that took place in 2020, you get, roughly, 2021’s numbers; in other words, the number of crossings taking place now could constitute a normal level of volume being combined with “pent-up” volume related to COVID-19.

Chuck Todd is, if anything, too prepared to uncritically recycle fascist propaganda.