Good morning, everyone. It’s been a bit since I’ve done my blog. I meant for it to be kind of a daily thing again, and then I had the idea that maybe it would be a weekly thing. Neither has really hit its mark. So today is a start in that right direction. As per usual, let’s start things off with some music. Have you heard Harry Styles’ new-ish song called American Girls? As I’ve told you before, my music tastes are all over the place.
The “Secure Border” Claim Doesn’t Hold Up
Here’s the thing about that number everyone loves throwing around — “border crossings down 90-plus percent under Trump.” It’s technically true and still deeply misleading, because it skips the part where crossings were already collapsing before he took office.
Illegal crossings peaked in December 2023 at roughly 250,000, then started falling all through 2024 — first because Mexico cracked down on transit migration, then because Biden’s June 2024 rule gutted asylum access at the border. By that December, crossings between ports of entry had already dropped 43% from June, according to the Migration Policy Institute, and by January 2025 — the month Trump was inaugurated — they were at multi-year lows. The steep decline predates his administration by nearly a year. Independent fact-checkers at PolitiFact and PBS both found the White House inflated the “before and after” comparison by stacking a single week of Trump-era data against a full-year average from Biden’s worst month, rather than the trendline that was already sloping down.
Then there’s the “zero” claim itself — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth literally made a zero with his hands and said illegal crossings were at zero. DHS’s own numbers to Congress say otherwise: an estimated 70,000–73,000 people evaded capture entirely (“gotaways”) in fiscal year 2025 alone, and roughly 47–48 people a day are still getting through uncaught in 2026, per NewsNation’s reporting. Even Fox News, citing a senior DHS source, put the number at 132 known gotaways a day as of last year — framed as a 93% improvement from the Biden years, but still a long way from zero. Former CBP Commissioner Mark Morgan — who ran the agency under Trump’s first term — has said the real number is likely higher, since agencies only track known gotaways, not the ones nobody spotted at all.
Call me crazy, but “the most secure border in history” and “we’re not totally sure how many people got through” feel like they belong in different press releases. It’s the security equivalent of a store bragging about its state-of-the-art alarm system right after admitting they don’t actually know how much inventory walked out the back door.
Worth pointing out where each of these claims actually came from: the “zero” line was said out loud, on camera, at a podium. The gotaway numbers weren’t — they came through a written statement to NewsNation and data quietly sent to Congress, not from a DHS official saying it into a microphone. That’s part of why the “zero” claim traveled so much further than the correction ever did — one was a soundbite, the other was a paragraph buried in a report. Here’s Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth making the claim himself at the Reagan National Defense Forum on December 6, 2025:
Background: This clip is from Hegseth’s keynote address at the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, California, on December 6, 2025 — an annual gathering of defense officials, military brass, and industry figures. In the middle of a speech largely focused on defending the administration’s strikes on alleged drug-trafficking boats in the Caribbean, Hegseth made a “0” gesture with his hand and declared illegal crossings were at zero. He’s repeated versions of the claim since — “zero” again at a Northeast Defense Summit in November 2025, and “effectively zero” at a Pentagon medal ceremony in July 2026 — even as DHS’s own written data to Congress and reporters put known “gotaways” in the tens of thousands.
None of this means encounters haven’t dropped — they clearly have, and by a lot. But “the border is completely secure” and “crossings declined sharply, partly for reasons that started before Trump took office, and tens of thousands of people are still getting through undetected every year” are two very different claims. Only one of them is true.
One more clip worth sitting with: Marjorie Taylor Greene — one of Trump’s most loyal allies in Congress for years, before a public break with him this past fall over the Epstein files — sat down for a PBS “Firing Line” interview and didn’t hold back. She says Trump owes apologies all around: to her personally, to Bloomberg reporter Catherine Lucey (whom Trump snapped “Quiet, piggy” at aboard Air Force One in November 2025 while she questioned him about Epstein), and to the country for what she called broken campaign promises.
That clip is pulled from a longer sit-down on PBS’s Firing Line with host Margaret Hoover, where Greene goes deeper on her split from Trump, why she resigned from Congress, and whether she’s open to a third party. Worth watching in full if you want the context:
Sources
- Migration Policy Institute — on the pre-2025 decline in border encounters
- PolitiFact — fact-check of the White House’s before/after comparison
- PBS NewsHour — fact-check of illegal immigration decline claims
- Axios — reporting on the “zero” claim’s unraveling
- NewsNation — on gotaways and DHS border vulnerabilities
- NewsNation — DHS’s written statement disputing the “zero” narrative
- Fox News — even a Trump-friendly outlet’s own DHS-sourced numbers confirm gotaways aren’t zero
- PBS NewsHour — video and coverage of Hegseth’s Reagan National Defense Forum keynote
- PBS Firing Line — Marjorie Taylor Greene interview on her break with Trump
- Reuters (via Yahoo News) — on Trump calling reporter Catherine Lucey “piggy”
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