A “Morning Joe” contributor on left-leaning MSNBC admitted that the administration’s immigration policies were “not Biden’s finest moment” and conceded that President-elect Donald Trump “is not wrong” about the low number of illegal crossings when he left office.
Steve Rattner, a former Obama administration official who now manages the personal and philanthropic assets of former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, made the surprising statements Thursday during a segment that analyzed key trends of 2024.
Rattner pointed to one chart from an op-ed that he wrote for the New York Times earlier this week that showed the stark contrast between the number of border crossings before and after President Biden took office.
“The border was not Biden’s finest moment, frankly,” Rattner said as he highlighted the sharp increase in the number of encounters between border officials and migrants along the frontier with Mexico once Biden took office in January 2021.
“You can see what happened here,” Rattner said while pointing to the graph.
“And Trump is not wrong when he talks about how border crossings were quite low. They’re running about 74,000 a month when he left office and they, in fact, did shoot up.”
The MSNBC analyst said the spike in the number of migrant crossings could be attributed to “some things Biden said” and “some ways that they put a moratorium, for example, on deportations.”
“But in fact, we did get up here almost to 300,000 a month,” Rattner continued during the segment, adding that “what maybe people don’t entirely know is that border crossings have come back down almost to where they were under Trump.”
“They’re running at about 100,000 at the moment,” Rattner said. “So we went up the hill and we went down the hill. But unfortunately, that was pretty costly to Biden during the election.”
The Post has sought comment from the White House.
“President Trump was given a mandate by the American people to stop the invasion of illegal immigrants, secure the border, and deport dangerous criminals and terrorists that make our communities less safe. He will deliver,” Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for the Trump transition team, told The Post.
Rattner’s comments were reported by the news site Mediaite.
There were about 44,000 arrests during December — the sixth straight month that arrests for illegal crossings were less than the monthly average in 2019, according to a senior Customs and Border Protection official.
An average of 2.4 million immigrants per year poured into the US between 2021 and 2024, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
About 60% of the migrants crossed into the US illegally, a Goldman Sachs analysis found.
Since January 2021, CBP reported more than 7.2 million migrant encounters at the US-Mexico border.
Between fiscal years 2021 and 2023, there were more than 1.5 million “gotaways” — migrants who were detected but not apprehended by the Border Patrol.
With Post wires