Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler slammed Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) on Wednesday for alleging President Joe Biden was stronger than President-elect Donald Trump on securing the southern border.
Under the Biden-Harris administration, the southern border remained open:
- Nearly two million known gotaways evaded U.S. Border Patrol under the Biden-Harris administration, according to numbers released by Republicans on the House Committee on Homeland Security in April.
- The administration allows up to 650,000 criminal migrants and suspects — including at least 13,099 migrant convicted murderers and 222,141 migrants facing criminal charges — to roam through American communities, according to data released by House Republicans.
- The illegal migrant population in the United States was 11 million in 2022, according to Pew Research Center estimates published in July, although critics estimate those numbers to be much higher.
Pelosi, however, told the New York Times on November 9 that Democrat campaign messaging failed to properly tout how “fewer people came in” under the Biden administration than the Trump administration.
“I don’t think we were clear enough by saying fewer people came in under President Joe Biden than came under Donald Trump,” Pelosi said. “It’s clarity of the message, and if that’s what Bernie’s talking about, and that’s what Joe Manchin’s talking about, we weren’t clear in our message as to what things are, then I agree with that.”
Pelosi’s office later tried to clarify that her statement was about deportations, not migrant inflows.
Kessler ripped Pelosi’s claim as not supported by data.
“[D]ata does not back her up … It’s a documented fact that at least four times as many migrants entered the United States under Biden than under Trump,” he wrote:
So at a basic level, Pelosi’s claim is wrong, even on deportations as measured by Reuters. When we dig deeper in the numbers, her statement veers even more off course.
A large percentage of Biden’s deportations were conducted by CBP, a trend that has increased since the president all but halted asylum claims at the border in June. Swamped by a surge of migrants, the Biden administration in 2021 focused on removing migrants who posed a threat to national security or public safety, or were recent border crossers. Deportations carried out by CBP are easier because they do not require a formal order. Moreover, ICE agents were diverted to help with the numbers at the southwest border, reducing its arrests in the interior.
During Trump’s term and most of Barack Obama’s term, ICE handled most of the deportations, according to Reuters’s analysis of the data. But under Biden, ICE deportations especially fell. That’s a good measure of the intensity of ICE enforcement in the interior.
Wendell Husebo is a political reporter with Breitbart News and a former RNC War Room Analyst. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality. Follow Wendell on “X” @WendellHusebø or on Truth Social @WendellHusebo.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.