WaPo calls out Pelosi's lie on Illegals

Posted on: November 14, 2024 at 12:44:45 CT

Four Pinocchios
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/11/13/pelosis-flawed-claim-that-biden-did-better-than-trump-border/

In a post-election interview, Pelosi made this point when the interviewer challenged her on the impact of the surge of migrants across the southern border. Pelosi criticized Trump for saying the undocumented immigrants were criminals, saying “they weren’t, they weren’t.” The interviewer shot back that “people felt quite strongly that they didn’t want to see immigrants sleeping in police stations, at airports.”

“I don’t think we were clear enough by saying fewer people came in under President Joe Biden than came under Donald Trump,” Pelosi responded. “It’s clarity of the message, and if that’s what Bernie [Sanders] is talking about, and that’s what Joe Manchin’s talking about, we weren’t clear in our message as to what things are, then I agree with that.”

But Pelosi’s line was as clear as mud. It’s a documented fact that at least four times as many migrants entered the United States under Biden than under Trump.

A Pelosi aide said that she meant to refer to deportations and pointed to a Reuters article that Biden was now deporting more people than Trump.

It’s bad enough to bungle a line when you’re arguing for clearer messaging. But is Pelosi’s intended point correct?

The Facts
There’s no clear measure of deportations by the Department of Homeland Security, so there are lots of datasets that can be used — or misused.

The Reuters article added together deportations by Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which enforces immigration laws at the border, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which apprehends unauthorized immigrants inside the country. It showed that in fiscal year 2024, Biden was on pace to exceed the number of deportations of any single year under Trump. But the article did not say that deportations under Biden would be higher than they were under Trump — far from it. Through four years, Biden almost certainly will have fewer deportations than Trump, according to the Reuters count.

So at a basic level, Pelosi’s claim is wrong, even on deportations as measured by Reuters. When we dig deeper in the numbers, her statement veers even more off course.

A large percentage of Biden’s deportations were conducted by CBP, a trend that has increased since the president all but halted asylum claims at the border in June. Swamped by a surge of migrants, the Biden administration in 2021 focused on removing migrants who posed a threat to national security or public safety, or were recent border crossers. Deportations carried out by CBP are easier, because they do not require a formal order. Moreover, ICE agents were diverted to help with the numbers at the southwest border, reducing its arrests in the interior.

During Trump’s term and most of Barack Obama’s terms, ICE handled most of the deportations, according to Reuters’s analysis of the data. But under Biden, ICE deportations especially fell. That’s a good measure of the intensity of ICE enforcement in the interior.


Under Trump, Department of Homeland Security removals attributed to ICE as the initial arresting agency were (by fiscal year):

72,500 (2017)
81,860 (2018)
72,710 (2019)
52,870 (2020)
Under Biden, the numbers fell dramatically:

28,250 (2021)
25,470 (2022)
39,170 (2023)
35,850 (through July 2024)

Now it should be noted that Trump’s deportations were lower than under Obama, who was dubbed the deporter-in-chief. Moreover, data obtained by the Cato Institute suggests that Trump, during his first term, released more convicted criminals into the United States than Biden. That’s because Obama had ordered agents to detain and remove noncitizens who committed serious crimes. Trump scrapped that directive, saying no one in the country illegally should be spared, so ICE turned its attention to anyone in the country illegally, even if they had committed no crimes.

Meanwhile, even with a broad focus, Trump failed to match Obama’s record on deportations. ICE now doesn’t have the manpower to do more — which, without a massive increase in funding, calls into question Trump’s campaign pledge to deport millions of undocumented immigrants.


David Bier, director of immigration studies at Cato, said that if Pelosi were talking about border arrests, she would have a case. Thanks largely to a pandemic-related rule, Title 42, implemented by Trump, Biden expelled or deported 4.4 million people, compared to 2.1 million for Trump. Many of the people expelled under Title 42, however, were repeat offenders and some eventually slipped in. That’s not a good measure of enforcement activity. The number of deportations — which is what Pelosi’s aide said she was referring to — fell. And, by any measure, more undocumented immigrants entered the country and have remained under Biden than under Trump.

The Pinocchio Test
The surge of migrants at the border was an albatross for Democrats in the 2024 election. Pelosi suggests that a clearer message might have made a difference. But her point is obscure and contradicted by the data. Removals of undocumented immigrants from the interior of the country fell under Biden.


With Cato’s data, Pelosi might have argued that Trump’s broad-brush roundup of undocumented immigrants led him to release more criminals in the United States than Biden. Given Trump’s constant mantra that Biden was letting criminals into the country, perhaps that would have been an effective counterargument.

But that’s not what Pelosi said. And what she said, even as revised, is wrong. She earns Four Pinocchios.

Four Pinocchios

Edited by Spanky at 12:46:19 on 11/14/24