News Reporter: Fact Checker: Pelosi’s flawed claim on Biden’s border enforcement

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The truth behind the rhetoric.

By Glenn Kessler

In a post-election interview, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) caught our attention with this line: "I don't think we were clear enough by saying fewer people came in under President Joe Biden than came under Donald Trump."

She made this point after the interviewer challenged her on the impact of the surge of migrants across the southern border. Pelosi criticized Trump for saying the undocumented immigrants were criminals, saying "they weren't, they weren't." The interviewer shot back that "people felt quite strongly that they didn't want to see immigrants sleeping in police stations, at airports."

Pelosi responded with her comment and added: "It's clarity of the message, and if that's what Bernie's talking about, and that's what Joe Manchin's talking about, we weren't clear in our message as to what things are, then I agree with that."

But Pelosi's line was as clear as mud. It's a documented fact that at least four times as many migrants entered the United States under Biden than under Trump. A Pelosi aide said that she meant to refer to deportations and pointed to a Reuters article that Biden was now deporting more people than Trump.

Is Pelosi's intended point correct? There's no clear measure of deportations by the Department of Homeland Security, so there are lots of datasets that can be used — or misused.

Click the link below to read our full report and find out the Pinocchio rating.

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Preparing for Trump 2.0

A reader last week sent this suggestion after Trump won the election: "Less Trump, more cats." Well, we certainly won't be able to ignore the president-elect in the next four years. Readers will recall that in Trump's first term, we documented every false and misleading statement that he made — which totaled 30,573 by the time he left office.

Many readers have suggested that we create a new database for his second term. With apologies, that's not likely to happen. The first project was overwhelming. Trump says many trivial things that are wrong and false, and we found ourselves running down too many rabbit holes. Having exhaustively documented Trump's disregard for facts then, we'd now like to focus more deeply on false statements that are important — that have policy consequences for the United States and the world.

But we also want to hear from readers. Send us your suggestions! How do you want Trump to be covered? What should we focus on?

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You can reach us via email, Twitter (@GlennKesslerWP and @AdriUsero) or Facebook. We're also on TikTok. Read about our process and rating scale here, and sign up for the newsletter here.

About the cats: It's a Friday and sometimes our fact checks deal with heavy subjects. So we hope to bring a smile to your face.

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