Today, Donald Trump is traveling to Texas to visit the US-Mexico border. DNC Rapid Response Director Ammar Moussa released the following statement:

“Donald Trump and Republicans are bringing their clown show on the road in a desperate attempt to try to spin their cruel border policies to mislead voters. For four years, Republicans were silent as Trump sabotaged our immigration system and threw it into chaos. If Republicans were serious about addressing issues at the border, they’d join President Biden and Democrats in working to clean up the mess they left behind, create a safe and humane immigration system, and finally pass immigration reform. Anything less is political theatre.” 

THE TRUTH: Donald Trump and Republicans waged war on our immigration system, threw it into chaos, and left a 1.3 million case backlog for President Biden and the administration to clean up. 

Vox: “In the almost three years since President Donald Trump took office, the US asylum system has almost become unrecognizable. The administration has built up, layer by layer, a series of impediments in Central America, at the border, in detention centers, and in the immigration courts that have made obtaining asylum nearly impossible.”

Syracuse University: “When President Donald Trump assumed office, 542,411 people had deportation cases pending before the Immigration Courts. At the start of 2021, that number now stands at 1,290,766—nearly two and a half times the level when Trump assumed office just four years ago. Waiting in the wings are another 300,000+ cases that President Trump’s policy changes have decided aren’t finally resolved, but have not yet been placed back on the active docket.”

Wall Street Journal: “The Obama administration created the program in response to the first wave of unaccompanied minors crossing the border illegally, to offer them a safer alternative to reach the U.S. Former President Donald Trump terminated the program in 2017, saying it was an immigration pathway that had been created without congressional approval. President Biden restarted it March 10.”

THE TRUTH: The Biden administration has successfully reduced the number of children held at the border after the Trump administration separated thousands of children from their families.

Politico: “The Trump administration separated thousands more migrant kids at the border than it previously acknowledged, and the separations began months before the policy was announced, according to a federal audit released Thursday morning.”

White House: “The administration successfully reduced the number of unaccompanied children in U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) facilities from 5,676 in late March to 570 on June 14.”

THE TRUTH: Many of the migrant children at the border came during the Trump administration.

Jennifer Podkul, Vice President of Kids in Need of Defense: “[T]hese aren’t brand new cases of people setting out for the U.S…. These are kids who’ve been waiting at the border, in some cases for more than a year.”