Over 10 million illegal aliens entered the U.S. under President Joe Biden’s leadership, a reality that even MSNBC has become critical of.
“The border was not Biden’s finest moment, frankly,” economic analyst Steve Rattner said on MSNBC Thursday.
Rattner, who served in the Obama administration, pointed to a large chart on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” showing the increase in border crossings from President Donald Trump’s first term to Biden’s administration.
“Trump is not wrong when he talks about how border crossings were quite low,” Rattner said. “They were running about 74,000 a month when he left office, and they in fact did shoot up. Some of it was some things Biden said, and some ways they put a moratorium, for example, on deportations. But, in fact, we did get up here almost to 300,000 a month.”
Rattner added that border crossings have now fallen “almost to where they were under Trump,” but noted that the high crossing numbers during much of Biden’s presidency were “costly to Biden during the election.”
Customs and Border Protection encountered nearly 93,000 illegal aliens at the borders in December 2020, Trump’s last full month in office. Six months into the Biden administration, Customs and Border Protection encountered more than twice that many illegal aliens in a single month before hitting a peak of 370,883 illegal immigrant encounters in December 2023.
As of November 2024, the latest reported month of federal government data, 125,238 migrants illegally crossed U.S. borders.
Trump made border security a pillar of his 2024 campaign, promising to stop the flow of illegal immigration and launch mass deportations of illegal aliens.
With Trump’s inauguration less than three weeks away, a new caravan of migrants set out from southern Mexico Thursday in hopes of reaching the U.S. border. The caravan is unlikely to reach the U.S. before Inauguration Day. The group is traveling from Tapachula, about 1,500 miles south of the most southern point of Texas, and the Mexico government already broken up two other migrant caravans at the end of 2024.
The majority of the migrants are from Venezuela, but the caravan also includes individuals from Guatemala, El Salvador, Peru, and Ecuador, according to The Associated Press.
Trump and his border czar Tom Homan are expected to launch deportations of illegal aliens this winter, beginning first with criminal illegal aliens.
