Broken Wide Open

A veritable flood that only got worse would be more accurate… liars lie, it why they make such great politicians.

Trump’s ChartDuring his speech in Green Bay on April 2, Trump claimed to have “fixed” the border when he was president.
Former President Donald Trump speaks at a rally on April 2 in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images.
“When I came in, I built 571 miles of wall, we had 200 miles sitting there waiting to be erected, far more than I said I was going to build,” Trump said.
Actually, a total of 458 miles of “border wall system” was built during the Trump administration, according to a Customs and Border Protection status report on Jan. 22, 2021. Most of that, 373 miles of it, was replacement for primary or secondary fencing that was dilapidated or outdated. In addition, 52 miles of new primary wall and 33 miles of secondary wall were built in locations where there were no barriers before. Including barriers that existed before Trump took office, there are now about 706 miles of barriers, covering about 36% of the total southwest border. That is far less than the 1,000-mile-long wall that Trump promised during the 2016 campaign.
Trump then had campaign aides put up a chart showing monthly border apprehensions going back to 2012. You can see the chart in the background of the C-SPAN video, but here it is:

“It’s an amazing chart actually,” Trump said. “It’s a Border Patrol chart. But look at that low number, got it down to practically nothing.”
Trump repeated the claim in an April 4 interview with Hugh Hewitt, saying, “We had the safest border in history, and you saw that chart that was released a couple days ago where literally the day I left office, we had the lowest number in history.”
The data in the chart itself are accurate, but the Trump campaign editorial notes are not.
The red arrow at the bottom purports to correspond to the point that “Trump leaves office” and to be the “lowest illegal immigration in recorded history!” But the arrow actually points to April 2020, when there were 16,182 apprehensions at the southwest border.
April 2020 was the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Throughout that month, the U.S. was under Trump administration guidelines recommending people stay at home and away from one another to slow the spread of the disease.

We discussed some of the reasons for that dramatic increase, including not only high levels of migration around the world due to political and economic turmoil in other countries, but also the perception that Biden was more welcoming of migrants.
But illegal immigration was not “down to practically nothing” in the weeks or months before Trump left office. It was down to nearly nothing during the stay-at-home phase of the pandemic.