CLAIM: President Joe Biden claimed at his high-stakes make-or-break NATO press conference that border crossings are lower than when former President Donald Trump left office.
VERDICT: FALSE. NBC News reported 84,000 illegal immigrants were apprehended at the border in June 2024. In January 2021, when Trump left office, there were 75,000 migrant encounters along the southwest border.
Biden’s false claim came after his attempt to blame Trump for the failure of the left-wing pro-migration border package earlier this year.
“So I took executive action last month. As a consequence, working with Mexico, border encounters have gone down over 50 percent. The current level is lower today than when Trump left office,” he claimed.
While Biden’s June border encounter numbers are the lowest of his presidency, per NBC News, they do not include the foreign nationals who entered America through Biden’s CBP One parole pipeline. The pipeline has seen millions of foreign nationals enter the U.S. since its inception in early 2023, as Breitbart News’s John Binder reported.
Moreover, southwest border encounters throughout the entire 2020 fiscal year were substantially lower than Biden’s best month in June. For instance, in April 2020, encounters registered 16,182, and 21,593 in May 2020. In December 2020, the first quarter of fiscal year 2021, border apprehensions registered at 70,630, as Breitbart News Texas’s Bob Price previously reported.
In March, the Heritage Foundation pinged the number of illegal aliens to enter the U.S. during the Biden administration to be over ten million.
The presser for Biden came as his horrendous debate performance in June ignited widespread panic about whether or not he should step aside for another candidate, though he has been adamant he will remain in the race. White House press secretary Karine Jean Pierre noted Wednesday that the White House is making a concerted effort to have the president engage more with the press.