Like a lot of the rest of the liberal media, Univision has clearly chosen to weaponize its fact-checking operation as part of its anti-Trump arsenal. On the evening of the President’s State of the Union Address, for example, the network’s heralded “Lie Detector” not only badly misfired against Trump, but also completely failed to catch a major fib told during the Democrats’ Spanish-language counter-message, which was delivered by California Attorney General Xavier Becerra.
In fact, the network’s attempt to score as a “lie” the President’s statement that there is no “urgent national crisis” at the border both misfired and backfired. The misfire consisted in ignoring the 280% surge in family unit apprehensions by the Border Patrol compared to last year, and the 81% surge in overall apprehensions between official ports of entry, while the backfire consisted in anchor Enrique Acevedo himself acknowledging that “the crisis on the border is humanitarian.”
ENRIQUE ACEVEDO, ANCHOR, UNIVISION: Upon talking about the situation on the border with Mexico, President Trump said that Republicans and Democrats must join forces to confront a national crisis, an ‘urgent national crisis’ he said. Well, the United States does not face an urgent national crisis at the border. What the President said is false. The number of undocumented detained on the southern border has gone down in the past 19 years. One million six hundred thousand arrests were made in 2000 while last year, in 2018, there were 400,000. The Border Patrol, the DEA as well, agree that the vast majority of drugs that enter the United States arrive through regular border entry points. The crisis on the border is humanitarian
While overall arrests of undocumented immigrants in the border region are down from historic highs, the fact that hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants continue to breach the border can certainly and legitimately be considered a persistent, ongoing crisis. Plus, the increase in large groups or caravans attempting to gain entry into the United States, along with soaring levels of asylum claims in recent years and inundated immigration courts, also buttress President Trump’s claim that there is indeed an “urgent national crisis” related to the problem of illegal immigration.
Another major problem with Univison’s “Lie Detector” is that it is apparently only capable of analyzing lies by Republican officeholders. None of California Democrat Attorney General Xavier Becerra’s Spanish-language counter-message to President Trump, for example, was subjected to the network’s Lie Detector, even though Becerra’s message included this whopper:
XAVIER BECERRA, ATTORNEY GENERAL OF CALIFORNIA: Who could believe that the state of our Union would be moved by President Trump's extravagant obsession with building a wall on the border that not even the experts want?
Becerra evidently ignores experts such as the men and women of the National Border Patrol Council (NBPC) as well as President Obama’s own former Border Patrol Chief, Mark Morgan. An April 2018 NBPC survey of 600 Border Patrol agents who work in two of the agency’s busiest Arizona and Texas sectors found that 89 percent of line agents agree that a “wall system in strategic locations is necessary to securing the border.”
President Obama’s former head of the Border Patrol, Mark Morgan, also recently delivered a ringing endorsement of President Trump’s border wall project, saying “I believe in what the President is doing. When he says that this is a national security problem, he’s absolutely correct. And that doesn’t come just from me - that comes from professionals who have been doing this their entire adult lives, serving the country on the border, protecting the citizens. They’re saying it works. Why aren’t we listening to the experts, and people who do it every day?”
