Trump came into office with a big show of force on immigration enforcement. He declared the border an emergency, embedded Fox News camera crews in ICE raids, sent troops to the border, threatened Canada and Mexico with broad tariffs, and used military flights to deport migrants. All of it was made to be one giant spectacle.

Less than a month into office, Trump’s administration talks little about immigration enforcement. They even stopped publishing their daily migrant arrest numbers. Why? Because they’re failing to meet their goals and are lagging behind the numbers Biden had achieved. Everything was smoke and mirrors, and mass deportations were simply a massive scam. Is the Southern Border a Problem?
The Southern border has seen high crossings for years. 2019 set a record for border crossings before the border cooled in early 2020. Then, for the final nine months of Trump’s presidency, crossings increased every month, ending at over 75,000 per month.

Crossings continued to increase under Biden’s presidency, with the largest monthly crossings occurring in December 2023. However, monthly crossings dropped rapidly throughout 2024. They were over 80% lower by December 2024, resulting in 47,000 crossings that month — 33% lower than when Trump left office and in line with the average monthly crossings of 2020.

If the border wasn’t a crisis or an “invasion” in 2020, when Trump was president, it wasn’t in the second half of 2024 either.

America voted for a fairy tale. People wanted to believe that we could force other countries to make us rich, cut waste to eliminate the deficit, and make prices go back in time. They wanted to think we could be a world leader while staying out of world affairs and that our problems weren’t created by ourselves but caused by migrants, foreign nations, and inclusivity.

America voted for promises that can never be kept.

-We can’t cut our way to a surplus
-We can’t tariff our way to prosperity
-We can’t reduce prices with a snap of our fingers

The fairy tale is a fable full of lessons. But will America learn from it?🧵 Elon Musk, co-leader of the fake Department of Government Efficiency, promised $2 trillion in cuts from the federal budget. This would more than eliminate the deficit and create a healthy surplus, allowing for more tax cuts aimed primarily at corporations and the wealthy. Many other Republicans promised similar feats. The idea is that our problems aren’t a lack of revenue but one of wasteful spending that could be easily tidied up.

Musk has admitted that the $2 trillion goal isn’t happening and would consider reaching even half of that an achievement. They won’t.

I didn't realize that a two-sentence tweet would get so much attention, so here is a longer explanation of why Social Security doesn't add to the national debt: 🧵 Americans pay a specific tax, known as a payroll tax, that funds Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment insurance. Social Security must use the funds it receives through the payroll tax to pay benefits and is prohibited from borrowing money. By law, Social Security can never increase the national debt.

So why do people claim that Social Security is increasing the debt?

The first reason is conflating a deficit with debt. Social Security has been paying out more than it has brought in in recent years. It has a deficit, but past years' surpluses have covered it. Social Security has not borrowed a penny to cover this deficit.

When people talk about how Social Security will run out of money at some point in the future, they mean that the past surpluses will be used up. At that point, Social Security still wouldn’t borrow money. Benefits would be reduced to what it can afford, about 80% of what they are today.

Reduced benefits would be a problem, so there is an urgency to solve the deficit before the surplus runs out, but Social Security would neither be out of money nor incurring debt.

Election Day is getting close. Here is what you need to know about the two candidates:

Economy

Trump:
-Lost millions of jobs, including hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs
-Awarded corporations who offshored 200,000 jobs over $420 billion in federal contracts
-Shot the unemployment rate up to 6.4%
-Debt-to-GDP ratio of 132%
-Said he would have an infrastructure week but never did anything
-Worked with Saudia Arabia and Russia to cut oil production, launching prices higher

Biden-Harris:
-Created over 16 million jobs, more than 600,000 of which are manufacturing jobs as factory investment boomed
-The unemployment rate has been continually near or below 4%. Currently 4.1%
-Debt-to-GDP ratio of 124%
-Infrastructure projects are happening nationwide
-Highest energy production in world history
-Real wages are higher now than before the pandemic Immigration/Border

Trump:
-Border crossings began rising in May 2020 and rose every month for nine months through the end of Trump’s term. His final month in office saw over 75,000
-Told Republican Senators to kill the conservative bipartisan border bill
-Signed an order barring any deportation of Venezuelan migrants on his way out of office. Venezuelan migrant encounters climbed to almost 200,000 by 2022
-Terrorist attacks happened inside the US

Biden-Harris:
-Border crossings have dropped massively since December 2023. July, August, and September have seen the lowest number of border crossings since September 2020: ~54,000 per month.
-Biden was ready to sign the bipartisan border bill. Harris also said she would sign it.
-Reduced sanctions on Venezuela and addressed other root causes to reduce migration substantially
-No terrorist attacks have happened inside the US

The FBI just released its annual crime statistics report for the United States. The report was filled with good news:

-Murder and non-negligent manslaughter decreased 11.6%
-Rape saw a 9.4% decrease
-Aggravated assault decreased 2.8%
-Robbery decreased 0.3%
-Hate Crimes decreased 0.6%
-Overall, violent crime decreased 3%

That is on top of the good news from the 2022 report, which found:

-Murder and non-negligent manslaughter decreased 6.1%
-Rape decreased 5.4%
-Aggravated assault decreased 1.1%
-Overall, violent crime decreased 1.7%
-Robbery did increase 1.3% in 2022

The US has reached the lowest violent crime rate in 50 years, and crime continues to decrease significantly in 2024.

This should be a cause for celebration, but it isn’t for some. Republicans have dismissed these reductions in crime during the entire Biden-Harris administration. They don’t want to see a Democratic administration succeeding because that increases the chances that Democrats will win in the upcoming election.

This has caused many in the Republican party, including Donald Trump, to believe the lie that crime is rising, not falling and that major cities aren’t reporting their crime data to the FBI.

It is surprising how long this lie has lasted, given how easy it is for anyone with an internet connection to disprove. It is difficult to be sure where this lie originated, but one website, The Marshall Project, is routinely referenced to defend this falsehood.

At its core, The Marshall Project is a professional-looking site of a non-profit focused on criminal justice. There are likely plenty of factual articles and reports throughout their site. However, a key one isn’t: their claims that police data is missing from the FBI database.

They’ve written about it multiple times, and it has been picked up by newspapers and the media across the country, including trusted names like Newsweek. The issue is that none of these outlets fact-checked The Marshall Project’s data despite it being publicly available.

It doesn’t take much to debunk their claims, such as their claim that over 30% of police agencies didn’t report their data to the FBI in 2022 or 2023.

A simple look at the FBI data shows a report rate of 83.3% of agencies in 2022 and 85.2% in 2023, which covered 93.5% and 94.3% of the US population, respectively.

That is very much in line with the report rate for 2020, which saw 85.4% of agencies report their data, covering 95.2% of the population.