The president has made this claim for over two years — but there is still no evidence. (Meg Kelly/The Washington Post)
“This is a deep intellectual problem that is plaguing this city, which is that we’ve had thousands of Americans die year after year after year because of threats crossing our southern border.”
— Stephen Miller, senior adviser to President Trump, in an interview with “Fox News Sunday,” Feb. 17, 2019
Miller slipped this line in the final seconds of his contentious interview with host Chris Wallace over President Trump’s emergency declaration to fund a wall along the southern border, so some viewers might have missed it. But it’s an astonishing statement, suggesting that undocumented immigrants kill thousands of Americans every year.
The White House did not respond to a query concerning Miller’s math, but other anti-immigration advocates have made similar claims. Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) claimed in December that there are “thousands of Americans who are dead each year because [of] the Democrats’ refusal to secure our borders.” President Trump claimed in 2018 that 63,000 Americans have been killed by illegal immigrants since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, which works out to about 3,700 a year.
View the complete February 21 article by Glenn Kessler on The Washington Post website here.