As Twitchy reported Wednesday, TIME magazine selected Donald Trump as its Person of the Year (for the second time) and put him on the cover … without the snark that he was the "President of the Divided States."
PolitiFact has sprung into action and is already fact-checking TIME's story, reaching back to a quote from Trump from 2021: "We proudly handed the Biden administration the most secure border in history. All they had to do was keep this smooth-running system on autopilot." But PolitiFact says "some metrics suggest Trump didn't attain the most secure border in history."
In an interview related to being chosen as Time’s Person of the Year, President-elect Trump said “I had the most secure border we've ever had.”
— PolitiFact (@PolitiFact) December 12, 2024
While Trump promoted building a wall, some metrics suggest Trump didn’t attain the most secure border in history. Trump omits that the…
… Trump omits that the surge of migrants coming to the border started in the spring of 2020 when he was still in office.
While Trump presents the border surge as a "disaster" under Biden, the spike in migrants, especially unaccompanied minors, started in the spring of 2020 during the Trump administration and generally continued to climb each month. …
…
Besides U.S. policy, factors that drive migrants to leave their home countries have included economic havoc caused by hurricanes and the pandemic, and yearslong problems associated with violence. The numbers of migrants arriving at the border also tend to spike in the spring and summer months.
When Biden took office, there was a pent-up demand to cross the border due to asylum seekers who were waiting in Mexican border towns because of Trump’s "Remain in Mexico" program and pandemic-related border closures.
The Biden administration has repeatedly said that the border is closed. But it has made some policy changes, such as choosing not to expel unaccompanied children who cross illegally, even though it has the legal authority to do so.
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Joe Biden literally said during the primary debates that immigrants should "surge to the border" as soon as he was elected, and they did. Right on cue, a caravan of at least 3,000 Hondurans marched to the US-Mexico border in time for Biden to take over as president.
Remember the photo of all of the immigrants on the Mexican side of the border wearing matching T-shirts saying, "Biden, please let us in," incorporating the Biden campaign's logo. Some taxpayer-funded NGO most likely handed out the shirts.
Ah yes, everything is back to normal. https://t.co/KRFyhYc46F
— Blame Big Government (@BlameBigGovt) December 12, 2024
Yep, PolitiFact is back in action.
A garbage “fact check.” So if the border wasn’t “the most secure” under Trump, then under which president was the border the most secure? https://t.co/vYVafJZywJ
— Marathon Pundit (@Marathonpundit) December 12, 2024
A surge of migrants during Covid? Seriously?
— Mike Breslin, Ph.D. 🇺🇸🇮🇱 (@mikebreslin815) December 12, 2024
We weren't even allowed to leave our houses.
To the border? Or across the border?
— Steve (@steveo_moose) December 12, 2024
That is the question.
Trump is known for hyperbole, but he wasn't lying when he said all the Biden administration had to do was keep the existing system on autopilot — so of course, on his first day in office, Biden rescinded all of Trump's executive orders securing the border.
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