NBC News Hides Biden’s Migrant Deaths, but Grills JD Vance on ‘Family Separation’

A migrant family seeking asylum from Ecuador pray together while waiting to be apprehended
Brandon Bell/Getty
Neil Munro

NBC News tried and failed to get vice-presidential candidate JD Vance to validate the Democrats’ “family separation” talking point, in the hope he would damage President Donald Trump’s promise to deport illegal migrants.

But host Kristen Welker ignored the reality that President Joe Biden’s administration has permanently separated at least five thousand dead migrants from their families by not enforcing border law since 2021.

Those thousands of migrants have died in jungles, seas, rivers, and worksites, from floods, blizzards, accidents, bandits, and storms. The huge death toll has permanently separated thousands of parents from children, and children from parents, all because Biden dangled the offer of entry into U.S. society.

Yet NBC host Kristen Welker ignored Biden’s massive separations as she pushed Vance to promise that illegal migrants will not be separated from their children when the adults are jailed for violating border laws:

Would you separate families as a part of your mass deportation effort? …  Let me ask this fundamental question: will families be separated under your mass deportation? …. Many people want to know the answer to this : Will families be separated under your mass deportation policy?

Vance nimbly fended off Welken’s questions while denying her any video snippets for use in Democratic attack ads. He told her:

What Kamala Harris says is that Donald Trump wants to separate families. Kamala Harris’ policies have led to thousands upon thousands of migrant children living with sex traffickers and drug cartels. That is the consequence of her policies …

There was a zero tolerance [border enforcement] policy during the Trump administration, and that led to less family separation than under Kamala Harris’ border policies. That’s what’s so striking about this. Actually enforcing our border is the most humane thing, for children and certainly for American citizens.

“But I don’t hear you denying that families will be separated,” Welken complained.

“The root causes of migration, I would say, Kristen, is that Kamala Harris refuses to do her job as border czar,” Vance said.

Democratic candidate Kamala Harris “ran away” from Biden’s request that she take a central role in the migration crisis, according to administration officials who spoke to Axios.com.

Welken added a comment after she lost the interview to Vance:

And a note on Senator Vance’s claim about family separation. The numbers show the Trump Administration separated more than 5500 families, most of them under than zero-tolerance policy. The Department of Homeland Security says currently up to a thousand children are separated from their families.

Even if 1,000 children and youths are still somehow separated from their illegal-migrant parents in a world linked by cellphones,  the harm is less than the death of several thousand migrants on their way to Biden’s dangled welcome.

Here’s an overview of the vast death toll caused by Biden and Harris’ decision to let the nation’s pro-migration border chief, Alejandro Mayorkas, welcome several million economic migrants.

In April 2024, Rep. Mark Green (R-TN), the chairman of the House’s Committee on Homeland Security, reported:

according to the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration (IOM), the number of migrants intending to illegally cross our border who have perished along the way, either en route to the United States or at the border, almost doubled during the tenure of Alejandro N. Mayorkas as secretary of Homeland Security from an average of about 700 a year during the fiscal years 2017 through 2020 to an average of about 1,300 a year during fiscal year 2021 through 2023.

An average death rate of 1,300 people adds up to 4,000 dead migrants since January 2021.

For example, Biden’s 2022 death toll includes 895 discovered bodies in deserts, mountains, and rivers, plus 96 people killed while crossing the border, plus 55 people killed while being pursued, pursued, processed, or detained by border agents, according to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Many migrants are killed in U.S. worksites, partly because they are often untrained and can be easily replaced.

RELATED: GOP Witness — Democrats Cry “Crocodile Tears” Over Migrant Deaths, Separations

House Judiciary GOP / YouTube

In December 2023, the administration’s Bureau of Labor Statistics released a report showing that “Foreign-born Hispanic or Latino workers accounted for 63.5 percent (792) of total Hispanic or Latino worker fatalities (1,248) [in 2022] … Fatalities in the construction industry accounted for 316 [or 40 percent] of the 792 foreign-born Hispanic or Latino worker deaths in 2022.

Some of the dead migrants were handed over by labor traffickers to federal agencies, via the program that supposedly cares for “Unaccompanied Alien Children” arriving at the border.

The federal government rarely polices the program — partly because of Kamala Harris’s amendments — ensuring that hundreds of thousands of separated and unsupervised youths are likely engaged in dangerous or illegal work far from their families.

In February 2023, the New York Times reported that at least 12 UAC youths were killed on the job:

“The deaths include a 14-year-old food delivery worker who was hit by a car while on his bike at a Brooklyn intersection; a 16-year-old who was crushed under a 35-ton tractor-scraper outside Atlanta; and a 15-year-old who fell 50 feet from a roof in Alabama where he was laying down shingles,” said the jarring February 25 report, titled “Alone and Exploited, Migrant Children Work Brutal Jobs Across the U.S.”

“No one can deny the fact that there are countless people who are harmed on the journey up to the United States [or] were trafficked or enslaved here in the United States,” lawyer Gene Hamilton told a March 7, 2024 hearing. He added:

So for all these crocodile tears that are shed [by Democrats] about what happened in a prosecution policy during the Trump administration, nobody cares about the 85,000-plus kids that this administration has lost [from official records, among] the 500,000 kids who have been trafficked here during this administration.

In August 2024, a DHS Inspector General report showed that Mayorkas has lost track of 320,000 migrant youths — not just the 85,000 cited by Hamilton. The youths are now “at risk for trafficking, exploitation, or forced labor,” the report said.

Additional migrants are also being killed by other migrants who have been invited into the United States by Mayorkas.

In June 2024, for example, Jhon Moises Chacaguasay-Ilbis, a 21-year-old illegal alien from Ecuador, was arrested in Syracuse, New York, and charged with second-degree murder of a 21-year-old woman who also migrated from Ecuador.

In August 2023, Breitbart reported:

Last week, the Pasadena Police Department arrested 18-year-old [Guatemalan migrant] Juan Carlos Garcia Rodriguez for allegedly raping [11-year-old Guatemalan migrant] Maria Gonzalez before strangling her and stuffing her lifeless body into a laundry basket that he then allegedly hid under her bed.

Many migrants die at sea or in the jungles and deserts and do not get counted in U.S. reports. In January 2022, a migrant boat sank leaving one survivor:

Despite being promised a boat that would not be overloaded, Juan Esteban said, there were at least 35 people aboard the ship. Among them: men and women from Haiti, Jamaica, the Bahamas. Only the ones from the Dominican Republic spoke Spanish. One woman carried a baby girl. The organizers did not provide life vests.

“That seemed bad to me,” Juan Esteban said, his skin darkened by days under the sun. “But I had such a desire to get to the country.”

The engine failed, and the boat foundered in rough seas, the Post reported:

About 15 people initially survived, [Estaban] said, and for a time they all held on to the overturned boat, finding it warmer to stay in the water than on the hull, where they were exposed to cold air. Two of the smugglers — both wearing life vests — were picked up by another boat, Juan Esteban’s attorney said. They promised to come back but never did.

Esteban’s sister, María Camila, did not survive the trip to Mayorkas’ welcome.

This graphic visualizes the countries of origin for the estimated 11.2 million unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. Data source: Migration Policy Institute, US Census Bureau. (Visual Capitalist via Getty Images)

The Wall Street Journal reported on September 2021 about one death among likely thousands in the Central American jungle’s Darien Gap:

Mr. Saintime said he walked ahead to see if he could round up food for his sister, who was getting dizzy and falling behind. Later, at a migrant camp in Panama, a travel companion told him that Jenny fainted and stopped breathing. She had to be left behind, the companion said.

“I don’t know how I’m going to tell my dad that my sister is dead,” said Mr. Saintime, sitting in an indigenous hamlet in Panama. He planned to continue his journey.

So many people died in the Darien gap that Mayorkas covertly funded the creation of a workaround route while he was declaring the U.S. border was secure. In February 2023, more than 30 people were reportedly killed when one of Mayorkas’ buses crashed.

“There were two images of his treacherous journey north that he couldn’t get out of his head,” Albinson Linares from Telemundo.com  said in 2023 about a Venezuelan migrant named Johan Torres:

The first was how a [migrant] person who resisted a robbery in Mexico was killed with a machete; the other happened in the jungle, when he saw a man leave behind his young daughter, waist-deep in mud.

“He left her there, lying in the mud and crying. And I couldn’t do anything because I was dying of exhaustion. But I can’t forget that,” he said with tears in his eyes.

“Migrants died in this journey coming here because Joe Biden told them to surge to our border and come into our country,” Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) told the March 7, 2024 hearing held by the House Committee on the Judiciary. “What’s the solution? Seems to me we call timeout. Seems to me we say no more,” said Jordan, chairman of the judiciary committee.

Established media sites have covered some of those deaths, although mostly at times and spots where few Americans can learn about the massive death toll under Harris that Welken and her comfortable colleagues prefer not to discuss.

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