Barely a month ago, Telemundo and NBC anchor José Díaz-Balart was harrumphingly telling his viewers that President Trump was all wrong about there being an illegal immigration crisis on the U.S. southern border. But now the anchorman has been forced to eat his words.
The about face came after the U.S. Department of Homeland Security released new numbers showing that between October 1, 2018 and January 31, 2019 Border Patrol agents arrested over 200,000 people who entered the United States unlawfully, an 84% increase compared to the 109,000 arrests during the same period the previous year.
Upon reporting the latest statistics, Telemundo’s top anchorman even grudgingly admits that the crisis level of illegal border crossings “somehow highlights the immigration policies of President Donald Trump.”
JOSÉ DÍAZ-BALART, ANCHOR, TELEMUNDO: If the trend continues at this rate, the year 2019 would be the year with more entries of immigrants since 2007. So that we understand: in the last four months immigration authorities detained about 200,000 immigrants at the border, which means a rise of 84 percent over the same period of the previous year which ended with the detention of 109,000 persons. By applying this rise to the whole year, the number of detainees in this 2019 would reach 730,000, which is a historical figure since the great crisis of 2007 and that somehow highlights the immigration policies of President Donald Trump
As recently as January 9 of this year, the same anchorman ridiculed Trump for even suggesting that there is an unprecedented humanitarian crisis at the border.
JOSÉ DÍAZ-BALART, ANCHOR, TELEMUNDO: Trump said that the southern border lives an unprecedented humanitarian crisis. The truth is that illegal crossings are at the lowest level in 18 years.
The liberal media are increasingly coming up short in trying to find excuses not to recognize the severity of the crisis at the border. As Border Patrol officials also indicate, the number of unauthorized family units apprehended during the same period is up 290% over last year, with caravans of one hundred or more people now becoming a regular occurrence.
Through the first four months of the new fiscal year, for example, DHS tracked 60 large groups of migrants (defined as at least 100 people). In 2018, the number of such groups was just 13 and in 2017, just one.
