For the past four presidential administrations, I have accompanied U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents and photographed their encounters with migrants as they enforced immigration policy. No longer. Last week, when I documented migrant detentions in El Paso, I had to do so from the Mexican side of the border, taking long-range shots. Until now, journalists haven’t had to stand in another country to cover what is happening in the United States.
Most asylum seekers cross the Rio Grande into South Texas on land controlled by federal agents. For decades, the U.S. government has let journalists accompany Border Patrol agents and other officials as they surveil the land. But since the change in administration, those agents have been physically blocking journalists from the riverbank. For example, after being turned down for official access on a trip in February, I followed a Border Patrol transport bus in my own vehicle to where agents were detaining migrants. They stopped me before I got close enough to take pictures. They called a supervisor, and ordered me to leave immediately.
We have gone from the Trump-era “zero tolerance” policy toward immigrants to a Biden-era “zero access” policy for journalists covering immigration. This development is unprecedented in modern history.
The Biden administration understands that the vast majority of their operatives with bylines will happily play along, and as a result, this crisis will fairly quickly be dispatched to the memory hole, once a new, Biden-created disaster comes along to take it off the front page.
And here we go! Boulder mass-murder suspect identified as White House signals gun-control response.
Do Biden’s handlers know how Democrats lost control of both houses of Congress in 1994? “Democrats passed an assault-weapons ban in September 1994. Even Bill Clinton credited that decision as one of the chief reasons the GOP took back the House two months later.”