With the start of 2024 a little over a couple of months away, it should come as little surprise to anyone that the mainstream media is already ramping up efforts at making excuses for the multiple failures of the Biden administration.

Among those failures is of course the border crisis, an issue on which Joe Biden and Congressional Democrats consistently get low marks from voters and which likely will be among the top five issues they will be judged on as Americans head to the polls next year.

On Tuesday, Axios filed a report in which it tried to gaslight readers over the term "open borders," a term Republicans and conservatives alike frequently use to accurately describe Joe Biden's border policies.

According to "Axios Latino" reporter Russell Contreras, the "open border" is a "myth" and he used the following rationale in an attempt to back up the claim:

Reality check: Since 1992, the U.S. has quadrupled the number of Border Patrol agents — from less than 5,000 to nearly 20,000 today.

• Barriers, walls, and fences have been erected along portions of the 1,951-mile U.S.-Mexico border, in addition to new Border Patrol outposts and high-tech surveillance systems.
• The Border Patrol regularly breaks border arrest records, highlighting the difficulty of entering the country illegally.
• Most recently, Biden decided to go forward with a border wall in South Texas.
• Lines at ports of entry have gotten longer because of new requirements to enter the U.S., putting pressure to expand hours at newer ports of entry like the one in Santa Teresa, New Mexico.

"Today, GOP presidential candidates repeat the false claim that President Biden supports open borders," Contreras, who in his Twitter bio describes himself as a "Race and Justice reporter," also wrote.

The big problem with his argument, however, was noted by Fox News national correspondent Bill Melugin, who has spent over two years at the border covering it extensively by land, air, and sea, oftentimes fact-checking Biden's spokespeople and cabinet members in the process. 

In two tweets, Melugin cut straight to the point:

This is so bad. You can tell whoever wrote this hasn’t spent much time at the border or hasn’t bothered talking to the agents tasked with patrolling it. Ask the 1.6 million + known gotaways how difficult it was to get in w/ chunks of the border unpatrolled while agents process.

.@RussContreras how do you write this ridiculous article without even speaking to anyone from Border Patrol, CBP, or DHS? Your only quote is from the Cato Institute, & you don’t even acknowledge Congressional testimony from Border Patrol leadership that the border is not secure.

Later, Melugin reported that "Any day now, CBP should be releasing the border numbers for the month of September" and said that according to his border patrol sources, "those numbers [for the southern border] will show almost 270,000 migrant encounters, the highest single month ever recorded, & will finish FY' 23 w/ around 2.47 million encounters, a new record again." 

Melugin's colleague Griff Jenkins, who has also spent a great deal of time covering the Biden border crisis, also responded accordingly to the Axios story:

This is stunningly ignorant of the undisputed facts and images from the actual border… FY23 saw more illegal crossings than at any other time in history. Last month alone saw some of the highest monthly numbers for any month ever on record… visit the border

Surely with his reporting coming under scrutiny by other media figures, you'd think Contreras would have something to say about it. But outside of dropping a link to the story on Twitter earlier in the day Tuesday (after Melugin's criticisms), he's been AWOL.

Can't really say that I blame him. If I wrote something that horribly off the mark I wouldn't want to hang out on social media much, either.

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