MSNBC analyst concedes record border crossings were 'not Biden's finest moment'
An MSNBC analyst admitted Thursday that the border issue wasn't President Biden’s "finest moment" after facing record numbers of border crossings over the years.
On MSNBC’s "Morning Joe," economic analyst and former Obama official Steve Rattner displayed a chart comparing border crossings under Biden and President-elect Donald Trump. The image showed, at one point, that nearly four times as many migrants crossed the border under Biden compared to Trump.
"The border was not Biden’s finest moment, frankly," Rattner said. "You can see what happened here. 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. They, in fact, did shoot up. Some of it was some things Biden said, and some was they put a moratorium, for example, on deportations. But, in fact, we did get up here almost to 300,000 a month."
However, Rattner added that the Biden administration has since been able to rein in illegal immigration despite continuing to face backlash over the issue.
"What maybe people don’t entirely know is that border crossings have come back down almost to where they were under Trump," Rattner said. "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."
Rattner made similar comments in a guest essay for the New York Times where he explained how the border factored into the 2024 election.
"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," Rattner wrote.
He continued, "But what Americans don’t seem to recognize — or give Mr. Biden credit for — was that by the fall of 2024, the total had dropped almost all the way back to where it was four years earlier."
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U.S. Customs and Border Protections reported to Fox News Digital that migrant crossings reached a record level at more than 302,000 encounters in Dec. 2023. In the months leading up to the election, Biden enacted an executive order to limit the number of crossings.
Though Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas insisted the border was "secure" that year, he admitted last month that "in hindsight" executive action from Biden could have happened sooner.