The intrepid journos at The New York Times (NYT) are here with breaking news: Former President Joe Biden screwed up the border. Real bad.
NYT reporter Christopher Flavelle opens with: “In the weeks after Joseph R. Biden Jr. was elected president, advisers delivered a warning: His approach to immigration could prove disastrous.”
Biden was elected in November 2020. The NYT is pursuing a story which began half a decade ago.
Why now?
In the last week, we’ve gotten major stories from the NYT on how the government of Ukraine is shockingly corrupt and how Biden’s border policy was disastrous.
Has the NYT considered reporting news critical of a Democrat policies when it actually matters? https://t.co/mfcKjYuBwL
— Mark Hemingway (@Heminator) December 7, 2025
Because the Biden presidency is “dead and buried,” as Daily Caller editor at large Geoffrey Ingersoll puts it, the NYT is now free to do some journalism-ing. (RELATED: Tough Trump Border Measures Lead To Lowest Border Crossings Ever Recorded)
The NYT paints a portrait of an administration which really couldn’t be bothered to deal with the border stuff.
“The president and his closest aides treated immigration as a distraction from other issues, such as the coronavirus pandemic and the economy.”
But Biden cared enough to create “new legal pathways for migration to ease pressure at the border,” the NYT admits.
An analogy: “Since making murder legal, the number of illegal killings has dropped to historic lows.”
The Biden administration cared enough about immigration to import over 400,000 migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.
A little late to the story here…
The New York Times FINALLY does “an examination of Mr. Biden’s record” on the border.
Where have y’all been?! pic.twitter.com/8KwlS2cAc3
— Nathan Brand (@NathanBrandWA) December 8, 2025
They cared enough to establish Operation Allies Welcome, the Afghan immigration program which brought the suspect in the National Guard shooting into the United States. (RELATED: REPORT: Alleged National Guardsmen Shooter Was ‘Not Functional’ For Months, Emails Warned)
That suspect, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, reportedly stopped functioning as a “person, father, and provider” shortly after moving to the United States. So much for vetting.
Apathy is a partial explanation for the Biden administration’s failures at the border. But a better explanation, one which the NYT does hint at, is intentional negligence. The Biden administration calculated that a “border surge would not be an important issue to most voters,” according to the Times. (Read: Especially Latinos.) More than that — the Biden administration likely believed that a border surge could benefit them in the short and long term, what with the voting patterns of immigrants and their children. (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: Most Hispanic Voters Back Trump Deportation Policy Amid Anti-ICE Riots, Poll Shows)
“By the halfway mark of Mr. Biden’s term, the failure of his approach was impossible to ignore,” says the NYT.
Congratulations, NYT, for achieving the almost impossible.
Follow Natalie Sandoval on X: @NatSandovalDC