The Border Patrol agents who were accused of “whipping” Haitian migrants have been cleared of wrongdoing. The same can’t be said for the liberals who smeared them in their support of opening up the southern border.
Fox News reported that the border agents under investigation in this faux whipping controversy have been cleared, though the New York Post reports that being cleared does not preclude the officers from being fired. But the agents have been cleared, and it was clear that they should have been almost immediately after the media-fabricated scandal broke. Even the photographer who took the pictures that were used to pillory the agents said he never saw the agents whip anyone.
But none of that stopped the controversy from rising all the way up to President Joe Biden. It was kick-started by Sawyer Hackett, a senior adviser to failed Democratic presidential candidate Julian Castro. It was then picked up and parroted uncritically by NBC News, the Washington Post, the New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, CBS News, and NPR. The framing from the legacy media was clear: The Border Patrol agents were the villains of the story, and this was an outrage.
Border patrol is mounted on horseback rounding up Haitian refugees with whips.
This is unfathomable cruelty towards people fleeing disaster and political ruin. The administration must stop this. pic.twitter.com/BSjT91NSj0
— Sawyer Hackett (@SawyerHackett) September 20, 2021
You would think that the bosses of those agents would defend them or at least make sure they weren’t being unfairly condemned. You would be wrong. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas played right along with the fake controversy. He said he was “horrified,” saying in the same breath that he would let the investigation run its course but that “the pictures that I observed troubled me profoundly.” Mayorkas told CNN that “one cannot weaponize a horse to aggressively attack a child. That is unacceptable.” His mind was already made up.
The Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General did not take up the case because it was so obviously a sham. But Biden couldn’t resist an opportunity to pander to his racially obsessed and open-borders base of support. “I promise you, those people will pay,” Biden said. “There will be an investigation underway now, and there will be consequences. There will be consequences.”
Though Mayorkas promised the investigation would be “completed in days if not weeks” in September 2021, the administration still has not given us its official conclusion. Despite the fact that it was understood that the agents were not whipping migrants “days if not weeks” after the incident, this investigation has been dragged out for six months and counting, all because it would make it clear Biden and Mayorkas left their Border Patrol agents out to dry.
This was a made-up scandal promoted in service of the Left’s opposition to immigration laws and the Border Patrol. It was parroted by liberal legacy media who only care about the border when the story reflects poorly on border agents.
