The administration is using heavily inflated numbers to argue for a border wall

By Philip Bump
January 4 at 1:38 PM

During his short appearance in the White House press briefing room on Thursday, President Trump dropped a number that Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen had mentioned during a Cabinet meeting the day before.

Introducing Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council, the president said: “This group [Border Patrol] has apprehended, last year, 17,000 criminals trying to get across the border — 17,000. And that’s one category, there are plenty of others.”

This number is important because of how Trump was deploying it: as evidence of the need for a wall on the border with Mexico. The almost two-week-old government shutdown, affecting a number of departments including Homeland Security, was initiated when Trump refused any funding deal that didn’t include money for a wall. To bring Democrats to his point of view, he has repeatedly argued for the necessity of the wall to stem an alleged influx of drugs and criminals.

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Let’s start by looking at the number for gang members. This has been a frequent discussion point for Trump, who has warned about the horrors of the spread of MS-13 across the country, implying frequently that members of that gang enter the United States by crossing the southern border illegally.

You’ll note, though, that the graphic above isn’t specific to the border. It mentions gang members (“including MS-13”) apprehended at the border — and removed from the country by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. According to a Homeland Security spokesman, about 5,000 of those 6,000 gang member arrests/apprehensions happened somewhere besides the southern border. Only 1,019 were apprehended at the southern border, about a fifth of them at designated ports of entry.

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