On Thursday, a left-leaning MSNBC contributor acknowledged that President Joe Biden’s handling of the border crisis was “not Biden’s finest moment” and that President-elect Donald Trump “is not wrong” about his handling of the crisis.
The analyst, Steve Rattner, previously worked in the Obama administration. On “Morning Joe,” he shared a series of charts analyzing Biden’s presidency.
Predictably, one chart detailed the number of illegal alien crossings in the United States.
“The border was not Biden’s finest moment, frankly,” he claimed.
“You can see what happened here,” Rattner said while pointing to the graph, which showed a sharp uptick.
“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,” he admitted.
“Some of it was some things Biden says and ways that they put a moratorium, for example, on deportations. But, in fact, we did get up here to almost 300,000 a month…border crossings have come back down,” he explained.
"They’re running about 100,000 at the moment. We went up the hill and went down the hill, but, unfortunately, that was costly to Biden during the election." he continued.
In an op-ed published in The New York Times, Rattner made the same revelation about Biden’s presidency (via NYT):
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A significant factor in the Democrats’ election loss was doubtless Americans’ fears of migrants storming our southern border. Yes, Mr. 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, compared with 74,000 at the end of the Trump presidency.
In a statement to the New York Post, Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for the Trump transition team, said that Trump will end the illegal alien invasion once he takes office.
“President Trump was given a mandate by the American people to stop the invasion of illegal immigrants, secure the border, and deport dangerous criminals and terrorists that make our communities less safe. He will deliver,” Leavitt said.
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