Former President Barack Obama deconstructed some of Donald Trump’s playbook attacks while campaigning for Vice President Kamala Harris in Nevada on Saturday.
Speaking at a rally in Las Vegas, Obama accused the Republican presidential nominee and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (Ohio), of leaning on scaremongering about immigration as an answer to any issue.
“If you challenge them, they’ll fall back on one answer. It does not matter what it is — housing, health care, education, paying for the bills — one answer: blame the immigrants,” he said.
“He wants you to believe that if you elect him, he will just round up whoever he wants and ship them out and all your problems will be solved,” he added.
He acknowledged that there’s a “real issue” at the border and elements of the system are “broken,” but criticized Trump’s approach.
“When I hear Donald Trump talk … he’s very quick to say to Kamala, ‘Well, you were vice president for four years,’” he added. “Dude, you were president for four years!”
That 100,000 number is the number of border encounters, which counts people caught crossing illegally and people trying legally but being denied entry. While we don’t have any way of knowing for sure, the apprehension rate was estimated at 78% in 2017-2020 and has quite possibly gone up a little since then. The 78% of people caught crossing is 100,000, the number of people actually crossing successfully is a lot lower.
And that’s the number of crossing encounters; likely the same people attempted to cross many times, and 78% of the time they were caught.
Oftentimes, people aren’t crossing the border to find a new life in the US; they’re crossing to visit friends, do some shopping/smuggling, or find some itinerant work, after which they cross the other direction.