Fact check: Border crossings are not down to Trump-era levels, as Joe Biden claims repeatedly

By BETHANY BLANKLEY | THE CENTER SQUARE

During President Joe Biden’s address to the American public Wednesday night, he said his administration secured the border.

Without discussing border policies in his 10-minute address, he touted his efforts in two sentences, saying, “We are also securing our border. Border crossings are lower today than when the previous administration left office.”

Several news outlets made similar claims.

“July is on track to see the fifth consecutive monthly drop in migrant apprehensions along the U.S.-Mexico border and the lowest level in illegal immigration there since the fall of 2020,” CBS News reported. “Migrant crossings plunge 55%” Newsweek reported; they dropped “over 40% since Biden announced asylum restrictions,” CNN reported.

“Biden finally got border numbers down,” The New York Times reported. PolitiFact labeled Biden’s claim that “migrants coming to our … border unlawfully … dropped dramatically,” as “mostly true” in its so-called “Truth-O-Meter.”

Accounting for all the data, including new ways the Biden administration is allowing foreign nationals to enter the country, the claims are verifiably false.

As The Center Square has reported every month since early 2021, after Biden took office, the number of illegal border crossers has increased, not gone down.

Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and several corporate media outlets cite incomplete apprehension data, excluding at least 2 million gotaways, those who evaded capture and are in the country illegally. It is unknown how many gotaways are violent criminals or potential terrorists.

The data they cite also excludes millions of foreign nationals who were unlawfully released into the country instead of detaining and removing them, former border officials have explained, including through parole programs that Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas created, which Republicans attorneys general and other elected officials maintain are illegal.

“Biden and Harris cannot hide the truth about our open border. To this day, they are still encountering on a daily basis, almost four times what the Trump administration did after Trump implemented his policies,” former director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement Tom Homan, who served under six presidents, told The Center Square.

Harris, who Biden tapped as his “border czar” in 2021, and the president “are simply playing a shell game by bringing thousands of illegal aliens into the country through the CBP One program and the CHNV program,” Homan said. “They claim they are ‘lawful pathways’ so they don’t have to count them as illegal between the ports of entry,” which are referred to as apprehensions.

Those entering through the parole programs, at the ports of entry and between ports of entry “are the same exact population,” Homan said, regardless if the administration labels them otherwise. The processes Harris and Mayorkas created are “an illegal abuse of the federal parole statute and they know it,” Homan said.

Homan also repeated a previous warning, saying, “The most important data point is this: how many illegal aliens has this administration released into the U.S. despite the legal requirement to detain them? At least 8 million.

“That is a horrendous data point that is far beyond many administrations combined. Historic.”

By apprehension data alone, Biden’s claims are verifiably false.

In June, for example, apprehensions totaled nearly 206,000, compared to nearly 212,000 in June 2023, nearly 248,000 in June 2022 and nearly 209,000 in June 2021, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data.

Monthly encounters at ports of entry of foreign nationals with no lawful basis to enter increased from nearly 20,000 in January 2021 to more than 117,000 in June 2024.

Last month, the greatest number of illegal foreign nationals were apprehended at the northern border for the month of June in U.S. history, more than 17,700.

Since January 2021, nearly every month and every year, new records are made with the greatest number of apprehensions at the southwest and northern borders, the most apprehensions of known or suspected terrorists, criminal noncitizens and gang members, and largest seizures of weapons and drugs reported in U.S. history.

Under Trump, there were nearly 527,000 apprehensions in fiscal 2017, 683,000 in fiscal 2018 and over 1.1 million in fiscal 2019, according to CBP data. Under Biden, there were over 1.95 million in fiscal 2021, over 2.7 million in fiscal 2022 and over 3.2 million in fiscal 2023, according to the data.

This fiscal year’s numbers so far total more than 2.5 million apprehensions, dwarfing any year under Trump.

The apprehension totals also exclude 680,500 foreign nationals brought into the U.S. using a CBP app, which Homan and attorneys general who sued to block the app’s use say is illegal.

The totals also exclude 104,130 Cubans, 194,027 Haitians, 86,101 Nicaraguans, and 110,541 Venezuelans released into the U.S. through (CHNV) parole programs contrary to federal law prohibiting their entry. The CHNV process is directly linked to violent crimes committed against Americans by the parolees, The Center Square reported.