Remembering the Border Patrol ‘Whip’ Smear, One Year Later

Welcome back to Forgotten Fact-Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we lament a year’s worth of slander at the southern border, a misleading Washington Post report on “gender-affirming care,” and hit more media misses.

Imagined Abuse in the Rio Grande 

One year ago, as the number of migrants being encountered by and slipping past Border Patrol agents skyrocketed, the press and Biden administration turned their attention not toward the issue at hand, but instead toward the supposed cruelty of those bearing the brunt of it.

After a photographer snapped a few pictures interpreted by the press as proof that agents were whipping migrants coming across the Rio Grande, President Biden promised that the red-handed agents would “pay” for their actions. “People [are] being strapped,” asserted Biden, who called this imagined abuse “an embarrassment,” “dangerous,” and “wrong.” 

Announcing new administration policy, then–White House press secretary Jen Psaki said that as a result of the “brutal and inappropriate measures” employed, agents would no longer be permitted to ride horses. 

The executive branch was only following the lead of the press, which breathlessly reported that the agents had whipped migrants without a single eyewitness account to support the claim. To the contrary, the very photographer whose work inspired the outrage and associated policy changes said that he’d “never seen them [Border Patrol agents] whip anyone.”

Nevertheless, the New York Times said that agents were seen “using the reins of their horses to strike at running migrants,” before later affixing a correction to the offending story acknowledging that “an earlier version . . . overstated what is known about the behavior of some Border Patrol agents on horseback. While the agents waved their reins while pushing migrants back into the Rio Grande, The Times has not seen conclusive evidence that migrants were struck with the reins.” 

As a former mounted Border Patrol supervisor explained to National Review at the time, there was nothing incriminating about agents waving their reins — it’s a kind of failsafe tactic used to get horses to move in the direction their riders want them to — but the Times provided no such context.

Axios smeared both the agents and their defenders by reporting that Texas governor Greg Abbott was offering jobs to “Border Patrol agents who whipped at migrants.”  

A few agents were ultimately disciplined for procedural mistakes, and one was found to have used denigrating language on the job, but an investigation into the incident “concluded that there is no evidence that any migrants were struck by reins and no evidence that any migrants were forced to return to Mexico or denied entry into the United States.”

Still, no apologies have been forthcoming, and the result has been a hazy public memory of the imbroglio. Biden himself never corrected the record, and his carelessness has been carried forward by other progressives who have used the initial shock at the media narrative to paint Border Patrol agents as unambiguous villains. 

Representative Ayanna Pressley (D., Mass.) recently tweeted “this happened one year ago today. #1YearAfterDelRio, we won’t stop fighting for *real* accountability & an immigration system that affirms asylum as the fundamental human right that it is.” 

Agnes Callamard, secretary general of Amnesty International, commemorated the first birthday of the border-whip lie by writing that “last September the world watched in horror a mounted Border Patrol officer using his reins to whip at Mirard Joseph, one of about 15,000 Haitian people seeking protection in Del Rio, Texas. As appalling as the incident was, it was the tip of the iceberg of decades of mistreatment.”

The lack of accountability taken for the misleading grandstanding from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue last fall has led to personal consequences for the Border Patrol agents still dealing with a bona fide crisis. 

A year later, we’ll stop holding our breath waiting for the president to hold himself to the same standard he holds low-level employees on the ground. 

Headline Fail of the Week

The Washington Post introduced the story of Morgan Davis, an investigator for Texas’s Department of Family and Protective Services, with the headline: “He came out as trans. Then Texas had him investigate parents of trans kids.” 

It’s followed by a lamentation over an executive order issued by Governor Greg Abbott, who has instructed Texas DPS to investigate instances in which minors are subjected to puberty blockers, opposite-sex hormones, and even surgical alterations to their physical appearance. According to the Post, the order was enacted despite the fact “that puberty blockers and hormone therapy are endorsed by all major medical associations as appropriate treatments for gender dysphoria.”

Of course, all across Europe, major medical associations are backing away from puberty blockers — the least intrusive of these “treatments” — for children, but that context goes unremarked upon, with the Post remaining squarely focused on the 52-year-old Davis’s political judgment of Abbott, whose order he calls “evil.”

Media Misses

• Keith Olbermann writes his own jokes — that is, jokes about Keith Olbermann — whether he realizes it or not. 

• With every utterance, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) proves Tom Wolfe more right: The “mightiest, holiest roll of all” really does go “Me… Me… Me… Me.” 

• If you needed any more evidence that the charmless, guileless ex-CNN anchor Chris Cuomo owed his now-defunct career to his last name, he provided it in a recent interview with the New York Times’s Kara Swisher.

• MSNBC contributor Jason Johnson bashed Trump supporters during a recent appearance on the network: “This is a cult. It’s not a political party. It’s a dime store front for a terrorist organization. I’ve been saying that for years.”