Remember when Vice President Kamala Harris was the Biden administration’s border czar, but then the role became politically inconvenient while she was running for president, and so the media decided that it had never happened? Now another immigration-related retcon may be upon us.

The occasion is the war of words over the federal budget. Republicans accuse Democrats of wanting to grant health benefits to illegal immigrants, while Democrats and allied “fact-checkers” deny it. The quick backstory here is that some illegal immigrants have a quasi-status that gives them limited protection from deportation. Examples include Temporary Protected Status (TPS), Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), and parole. Prior to passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), illegal immigrants with those statuses could access federal health benefits under certain circumstances. The OBBBA sunsets much of that access, but the Democratic budget would reinstate it. Therefore, it’s easy to see where Republicans get their talking point.

Nonetheless, fact-checkers have joined with Democrats in calling the claim about illegals receiving health benefits “misleading,” “false,” and “a flat-out lie.” Their reasoning? Illegal immigrants with limited protection from deportation aren’t really illegal immigrants. Granted, there is no objective definition of illegal immigrant in federal law, so the exact meaning of the term is open for debate. In my opinion, any noncitizen in the U.S. without a valid visa is “inadmissible” and should therefore be considered illegal, regardless of whether the government is deferring his or her deportation.

But leave that aside. The point here is that the fact-checkers’ newfound definition of “illegal” conflicts with their own precedent in reporting the estimated size of the illegal immigrant population. The Department of Homeland Security, the Pew Research Center, the Migration Policy Institute, the Center for Migration Studies, and the Center for Immigration Studies (where I work), all include migrants with temporary statuses — such as TPS and parole — in their counts of illegal immigrants. The fact-checkers have routinely cited those estimates in the past without claiming that they are overinclusive.

For example, less than two months before it called the current Republican talking point “false,” the AP ran an article on Pew’s estimate of 14 million illegal immigrants. The AP described all 14 million as “illegally in the U.S.,” noting that some have special status but never suggesting that they should be excluded from the count. Will the AP “correct” that story from August now that its content is inconvenient to Democrats?

Similarly, NPR came out swinging against Republicans in the current budget debate, favorably quoting a health policy professor who said, “Sometimes when Republicans use the phrase ‘illegal immigrant,’ they include people who actually have legal status . . . just because they don’t like them.” If that’s true, then it’s not only Republicans who harbor this irrational animus. The Pew Research Center, along with all of the other organizations listed above, must be seething with hatred — alongside NPR itself, which, like the AP, has run articles reporting Pew’s estimates of the number of illegal immigrants without any mention of an overcount.

Perhaps the media’s redefinition of “illegal immigrant” will be made retroactive, much as “She was never the border czar” became the received wisdom. But do the fact-checkers really want to undermine their own credibility while throwing the Pew Research Center and related organizations under the bus? That’s a steep price to pay just to help Democrats win a budget battle.