Graph From Immigration Expert Disputes Trump’s Latest Border Claims

An expert from an immigration organization posted a graph in an effort to dispute Donald Trump’s claims that he had “closed” the border during his presidency.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, shared a graph from the organization on X, formerly Twitter, showing monthly border apprehensions from October 2012 through January 2021, highlighting the cases under the Trump Administration.

Reichlin-Melnick wrote that border crossings in December 2020 were the highest for a December since 1999.

Reichlin-Melnick also referenced Title 42, which is an expulsion program aimed at removing individuals who arrived in the U.S. from another country where a communicable disease was present, which Trump made use of as president during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Reichlin-Melnic said that border apprehensions increased every month from when Title 42 was in effect until the end of Trump’s presidency. In a follow-up post, he linked to an article from the Migration Policy Institute that describes the use of the policy as “not the success its admirers contend in limiting irregular migration, and it may represent failed deterrence.”

Reichlin-Melnic’s post was in response to Trump’s comments while speaking at a campaign event in Arizona on Thursday. Discussing why he didn’t back a bipartisan immigration bill in February, he said President Biden “didn’t need a bill” if he wanted to “close the border.”

“I looked at them, I said, ‘we don’t have a bill, we don’t need a bill, close the damn border.’ They closed the border,” he said.

It’s not the first time Trump has made such a claim. Following similar comments in February, Republican Texas Representative Chip Roy said in a House floor speech, “With all due respect, that didn’t happen in 2017, ’18, ’19, and ’20,” adding, “There were millions of people who came into the United States during those four years.”

Semafor reported at the time that “Some mainstream immigration experts acknowledge that Trump’s policies likely helped bring down a massive spike in border crossings in 2019. And at their peak under Trump, the number of migrants arriving came nowhere near the current tally under Biden.”

However, it added that, “Conservatives also tend to exaggerate Trump’s successes at the border, conveniently ignoring that crossings began to surge again in 2020.”

Trump has promised that if elected for a second term, he will conduct mass deportations, and previously told Time magazine he would deport between 15 and 20 million people.

The latest available data from Pew Research Center from 2022 indicates that there are approximately 11 million illegal immigrants living in the U.S.

The American Immigration Council is a non-profit organization and advocacy group that works to shape American immigration policies through research and legal efforts.

Newsweek reached out to Reichlin-Melnick and the American Immigration Council for comment via a form on their website, and reached out to the Trump campaign via email.

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