There is no illegal immigration crisis along the Southwest U.S. border
By Kent R. Kroeger (January 23, 2019)
President Donald Trump has pinned the argument for building a wall along the U.S.-Mexican border on the existence of an immediate and worsening crisis.
“There is a humanitarian and security crisis on our southern border that requires urgent action,” said President Trump during his January 8th Oval Office address.
As for evidence, President Trump used his speech to focus on drugs, crime and human trafficking: “Thousands of children are being exploited by ruthless ‘coyotes’ and vicious cartels and gangs…Every week, 300 of our citizens are killed by heroin alone, 90 percent of which floods across our southern border…In the last two years, ICE officers made 266,000 arrests of aliens with criminal records.”
“The crisis is not going away,” the Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen tweeted after President Trump’s speech. “It is getting worse.”
Even the reflexively anti-Trump press judged most of his facts in Trump’s speech as accurate, if somewhat out of context.
Coming out of the speech, the Trump administration’s latest argument for the ‘Wall’ almost entirely ignores actual illegal immigration numbers — because if it did, the facts would not support the…
