The White House says President Obama is more committed to border security than any other president in history because of the lower number of illegal immigrants apprehended at the border during his time in office.
“There’s never been a greater commitment to border security, and that’s reflected in the numbers that we see of individuals who are apprehended attempting to cross the border,” press secretary Josh Earnest said Thursday.
The White House statement on border security is hardly new. Administration officials have made the same claim for years, even in the summer of 2014 amid an immigration crisis in which tens of thousands of unattended children tried to cross into the country in Texas.
Still, it comes in the middle of the GOP convention nominating Donald Trump, whose argument that the country cannot control its border with Mexico is a central tenet of his campaign.
The White House also is reiterating the claim one day before Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto is scheduled to visit Washington and hold a high-profile press conference with Obama, an undeniable effort to counter the claims Trump and others made about Obama’s immigration policies and executive orders granting the children of undocumented immigrants legal status.
Earnest said the numbers of apprehended illegal immigrants at the U.S.-Mexican border is lower than they’ve been in a generation and “that’s testament to the efforts that we have made under President Obama to strengthen our borders.”
“Part of that strategy includes effective coordination with the Mexican government — we’ve certainly enjoyed that effective cooperation with President Pena Nieto, and their conversation tomorrow will include a discussion about how to deepen that cooperation,” he said.
Earnest said Wednesday that Obama and Pena Nieto have no intention of spending time discussing Trump or his plans to build a wall between Mexico and the United States, although the topic will inevitably come up during a press conference they plan to hold.
“I would not anticipate much time at all being spent on discussing that,” Earnest said Wednesday.
While Earnest didn’t detail the administration’s border security policies behind his claim that Obama has demonstrated the strongest commitment in history, the administration previously has said it has doubled the number of Border Patrol agents, a 95 percent increase since 2004.
Critics argue that the first part of the White House website statement — that Obama is responsible for doubling the number of Border Patrol agents — is inaccurate because President George W. Bush is responsible for the majority of the sharp increase in Border Patrol agents over the past 10 years.
In 2014, there were a total of 20,979 Border Patrol agents — not all of whom were deployed to the border, according to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency. In 2008, the last year of Bush’s presidency, there were 17,499 Border Patrol agents.
