A former Obama administration official said Thursday that President-elect Donald Trump "is not wrong" about the massive spike in illegal immigration under President Joe Biden.
Steven Rattner, who served as counselor to the Treasury secretary under then-President Barack Obama, made the assertion on MSNBC, where he contributes as an economic analyst. Rattner was reviewing "the year in charts" that he had first written in a guest essay for The New York Times.
"The border was not Biden’s finest moment, frankly," Rattner began, pointing to a chart that showed a spike in illegal crossings in 2021, as soon as Biden took office. "You can see what happened here. And Trump is not wrong when he talks about how border crossings were quite low. They’re 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 that they put a moratorium, for example, on deportations," Rattner told MSNBC host Jonathan Lemire. "But in fact, we did get up here almost to 300,000 a month."
Once Biden realized the political issue that the border was becoming in 2024, his administration amended immigration policies, such as asylum, and struck a deal with Mexico to crack down on illegal crossings on their side of the border.
"But what maybe people don’t entirely know is that border crossings have come back down almost to where they were under Trump. 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 to Biden during the election," Rattner said.
In his essay for the Times, Rattner wrote that "Biden made a consequential mistake early in his presidency by at least seeming to encourage migrants to try to enter the United States, resulting in a surge of encounters to more than 300,000 a month by late 2023."
Trump has vowed to close the border on Day 1 of his administration and begin mass deportations of what he says are roughly 20 million illegals in the country, beginning with those convicted of crimes in this country or elsewhere.
Mark Swanson ✉
Mark Swanson, a Newsmax writer and editor, has nearly three decades of experience covering news, culture and politics.
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