CLAIM: Former President Donald Trump says migrants are arriving at the United States-Mexico border from all “corners of the globe.”
VERDICT: True. The latest Department of Homeland Security (DHS) data reveals an increasing share of migrants encountered at the border on President Joe Biden’s watch are from outside North America.
On Friday, after a Manhattan jury convicted him on 34 felony counts involving falsifying business records, Trump held a press conference at Trump Tower in New York City where he blasted Biden for record levels of illegal immigration.
“Our borders are open. Our borders are going to be closed very soon,” Trump said:
November 5 is going to the most important day in the history of our country. … Who on Earth can want open borders, where people are allowed to pour in, from countries unknown, from places unknown, from languages that we haven’t even heard of? We have people sitting in schools where very few people have ever even heard of these languages. It’s not like Spanish or French or Russian — languages unknown.
We have people coming from corners of the globe and many of them are not good people. Many terrorists. Record levels of terrorists … coming to our country [emphasis added].
Indeed, the latest DHS data shows migrants are increasingly arriving at the southern border from far-reaching regions of the world.
Andrew Arthur with the Center for Immigration Studies reviewed the DHS data, finding that an increasing share of migrants are coming to the border from Africa, China, Eastern Europe, India, Russia, Southeast Asia, and Turkey, among others.
Arthur writes:
Through the first seven months of FY 2024, [Customs and Border Protection] … have encountered more than 1.52 million inadmissible “applicants for admission,” of whom nearly 750,000 were “other than Mexican,” “other than Northern Triangle,” and “other than Nicaraguan” aliens — 49.3 percent of the total.
That includes 27,700 Chinese nationals, 16,668 from India, 9,383 Russians, and 7,486 aliens from Turkey. And, most ominously, 106,298 aliens simply listed as from “Other,” that is some other country that is not in CBP’s top-20 source nations. As recently as FY 2021, there were just over 17,500 apprehensions, total.
That “Other” is where you find all of the nationals of African countries, all the people from Southeast Asia, and the untold numbers of Europeans (mostly Eastern Europeans, like the 857 Romanians who are specifically enumerated, but you’d be surprised at how many other E.U. nationals are likely on the list) [emphasis added].
Compare this to when Trump was in office when, in Fiscal Year 2019, more than 7-in-10 migrants arriving at the border were from El Salvador, Guatemala, or Honduras, and nearly 2-in-10 from Mexico.
“We’re losing our country,” Trump said.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at
