Last week Donald Trump claimed that no one was coming across the border illegally:
Our border is secure, totally secure. We had nobody, zero, nobody in the last four months coming through illegally, which is actually hard to believe because they give me those numbers, but essentially, it would be just about nobody. They actually say zero. That’s actually hard to believe because when you had millions pouring across a year and a half ago, two years ago. But actually, we have it down to practically nobody.
This is a claim that he has been making for months, sometimes claiming that it must be true because there are “very liberal people that do the recordings.”
An obvious question is how would you know that someone crossed illegally, but you didn’t stop them from doing that? The explanation is that the number is actually the number of people the Border Patrol encountered at the border who were being released in to the US on parole.
There continue to be people being apprehended at the border. It is unclear how many people are illegally crossing the border, but the number Donald Trump is citing isn’t that. Does he not understand that? Who knows. Does he think the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency, which puts out the number, employs very liberal people? Probably not.
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