“The View” co-host Sunny Hostin interrupted her fellow co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin on Friday as she defended former President Donald Trump’s border policies.
Griffin said voters feel that President Joe Biden turned his back on the issue of border security until 2024, an election year. She pointed to the record surge in migrant apprehensions throughout the entirety of the Biden administration, in which apprehensions exceeded 2 million in the 2022 and 2023 fiscal years.
“But what I worry about is for a lot of voters, they feel like Joe Biden basically sat on this issue for three years and is finally waking up to it when Republicans have been saying ‘this is a crisis,’ ‘this is a crisis.’ It took too long to acknowledge it was a crisis and in one month, you had 300,000 people come under the Biden administration. That’s more than all of the first year of Trump’s term. Voters see that.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, but Biden has deported more people than Trump has during his entire administration,” co-host Sunny Hostin interjected.
“Because they didn’t come in in the first place,” Griffin said.
“No, that’s not true,” Hostin responded. [Former Presidents Bill] Clinton, [Barack] Obama, Democrats have deported more people. That’s not something that I’m proud of, but they deported more people.” (RELATED: ‘The View’ Co-Host Sara Haines Presses Joy Reid On Her Hot Mic Moment Blaming Biden For War)
Customs and Border Protection deported more than 142,000 immigrants in the 2023 fiscal year, which began in October 2022, according to The Washington Post. This number is nearly double the amount deported in the 2022 fiscal year and largely surpasses the 14,400 deportations during Trump’s final year in office.
Illegal migrant apprehensions during the current administration have nearly tripled the amount crossing the U.S.-Mexico border during the Trump administration. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) encountered over 3 million migrants in the 2023 fiscal year, and encounters have already surpassed 1.2 million in the 2024 fiscal year which began in October 2023.
CBP encountered 400,651 illegal migrants in the 2020 fiscal year, Trump’s final year in office, according to the agency’s data.
CBP apprehended a record-high of over 301,000 migrants in December alone, according to the agency’s apprehension data.