During a Thursday episode of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” a former Obama administration official admitted that border crossings surged after President-elect Donald Trump left office.
Steven Rattner, who previously served as counselor to the secretary of the treasury under former President Barack Obama, led the news segment, which featured a graph of the monthly encounters at the southern border under the Trump and Biden administrations.
‘Some of it was some things Biden said.’
The chart further broke down the encounters by citizenship, showing stats on foreign nationals from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, and all other nations.
“The border was not Biden’s finest moment, frankly. You can see what happened here,” Rattner said, pointing to a line on the graph that divided Trump’s administration from Biden’s, which indicated a severe increase in encounters.
“Trump is not wrong when he talks about how border crossings were quite low. They were running about 74,000 a month when he left office,” he continued. “And they, in fact, did shoot up. Some of it was some things Biden said and some ways that they put a moratorium, for example, on deportations.”
He noted that, at the peak, encounters reached 300,000 per month under the Biden administration.
“But what maybe people don’t entirely know is that border crossings have come back down almost to where they were under Trump,” Rattner claimed. “They’re running at about 100,000 at the moment. So we went up the hill, and we went down the hill. But unfortunately, that was pretty costly.”
Rattner’s analysis, which stated that the number of monthly encounters dropped under Biden, overlooked the various so-called “lawful pathways” the administration has implemented. One of those additional pathways is the CHNV program, which has allowed hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals to be flown into the country, thus avoiding an increase in the border encounter numbers.
Additionally, the CBP One app has enabled foreign nationals to make appointments to claim asylum. Likewise, those individuals are not included in the border encounter statistics.
The Biden administration has also extended Temporary Protected Status to foreign nationals from various countries, including Venezuela, El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua, and several others.
Furthermore, the U.S.-Canada border has experienced a significant increase in encounters under the current administration.
Encounter stats do not include known or unknown gotaways.
According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data, southern border crossings dropped to a four-year low in November.
Troy A. Miller, the acting head of U.S. CBP, stated, “Our enhanced enforcement efforts, combined with executive actions and coordination with Mexico and Central American countries in recent months, are having a sustained, meaningful impact.”
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