Fact check: How Trump uses a deceptive chart to lie about the border

Washington (CNN) — Former President Donald Trump keeps displaying a chart that includes a significant lie. And he keeps citing that deceptive chart to deliver his own lie about immigration trends in his last year in office.

The chart – the one Trump had fortunately turned his head to look at when a gunman tried to kill him at a campaign rally in July – is a bar chart about the monthly number of official encounters with migrants at the southern border. It features a large red arrow pointing to a month with a particularly small bar. And it says in red text beside that arrow: “TRUMP LEAVES OFFICE. LOWEST ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION IN RECORDED HISTORY!”

The monthly bars get bigger right after that, insinuating that illegal immigration suddenly began rising from a Trump record low when President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris were sworn in. And on numerous occasions, including in his recent public conversation with billionaire supporter Elon Musk, Trump has declared that the chart shows that the record low was set in his very last week in office.

“You see the arrow on the bottom, the red arrow on the bottom, that’s the lowest point. That was the week I left office. Look what happened after I left office. Look at that,” Trump said at a rally earlier this month in Montana.

“If you look at the arrow on the bottom, that’s the lowest level, the one on the bottom, heavy red arrow – that’s the lowest level of illegal immigrants ever to come into our country in recorded history, right there, right there. And that was my last week in office. And then you see what happened after I left. Look at the rest,” Trump said in his speech at the Republican National Convention in July.

But that’s not true.

Facts First: Trump’s claims are false. Illegal immigration was not at its lowest point in history in Trump’s last week in office in January 2021 – and contrary to the text on the chart, the red arrow does not actually point to January 2021. Rather, the arrow points to April 2020, when Trump still had more than eight months left in his term and global migration had slowed to a trickle because of the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. After hitting a roughly three-year low (not an all-time low) in April 2020, migration numbers at the southern border increased each and every month through the end of Trump’s term. 

In other words, the number of Border Patrol migrant encounters in between ports of entry at the southern border – a figure often used as a proxy for unauthorized border-crossings – had been rising for about three-quarters of a year when Biden and Harris took over from Trump.

The numbers did spike under Biden and Harris, but this increase represented an acceleration, not a reversal, of the upward trend at the end of the Trump era.

What the numbers show

The number of Border Patrol migrant encounters in between ports of entry at the southern border fell to 16,182 in April 2020, the month after the Covid-19 pandemic was declared. That was the lowest monthly number in about three years, not in US history; the monthly number was lower in four separate months earlier in Trump’s term, March through June 2017, including a Trump-era low of 11,127 in April 2017. (The number of Border Patrol encounters at the southern border was also much lower in the early 1960s, but distant historical comparisons are complicated by significant differences in laws, policies and staffing levels.)

Then, after April 2020, Border Patrol migrant encounters at the southern border rose in each of Trump’s remaining eight full months in office – plus a ninth month, January 2021, in which he was president for most of the month.

The size of the bars on Trump’s chart appear to be roughly correct, though it’s impossible to tell if they’re precisely accurate. But the red arrow purporting to show when Trump left office is clearly in the wrong spot.

Trump’s false claim that the red arrow points to the week he left office has been fact-checked repeatedly, including by FactCheck.org after he used the chart at a rally in Wisconsin in April. But Trump has never stopped making the false claim; in his Republican National Convention speech in July, he delivered it as the chart was displayed on multiple screens above him and beside him.

Asked why Trump continues to repeat the false claim, campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt did not respond directly on Monday. Instead, she credited a variety of Trump border policies for the low level of illegal immigration in 2020.

Other inaccurate claims

As PolitiFact reported in July, Trump’s chart appears to be based on a chart from Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin. Johnson told Fox News in July that he showed Trump his chart on a plane trip to a rally in Wisconsin in April, gave it to Trump’s staff after Trump liked it, and then “they made a few changes in terms of graphics.”

But the changes that appear on Trump’s chart include significant inaccuracies.

Johnson’s chart does not include the red arrow pointing to April 2020 or the red text wrongly claiming that the arrow points to when Trump left office. Johnson’s chart also does not include other false or unsupported statements on Trump’s chart.

For example, text at the top of Trump’s chart, which Johnson’s chart doesn’t have, claims that “MANY” of the migrants who have arrived under Biden are “FROM PRISONS AND MENTAL INSTITUTIONS,” a frequent Trump claim that he has never corroborated and that experts say is baseless. Text added to the top of Trump’s chart also claims the chart shows “ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION” numbers even though the text at the top of Johnson’s version shows that his chart includes migrants who arrived at legal ports of entry and were turned away.

Johnson’s office did not respond to a CNN request for comment on Monday. Leavitt did not respond to a request to address whether Trump’s staff added the inaccuracies to the chart.

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