Despite having been forced out of the job after a disastrous federal takeover of Minneapolis, President Donald Trump's former Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino continues to push extreme claims about illegal immigration — and one legal expert brought down the fact-check hammer on him Tuesday.
Bovino has repeatedly claimed for months that his goal is to deport 100 million people. He doubled down on this Monday, claiming on the Breanna Morello Show that he has personally verified there are 107 million unauthorized immigrants in the United States — a number which, as X-based political account Dominic Michael Tripi noted, "exceed[s] the semi-official number of 20 million by over 5x."
Bovino explained that he arrived at this number by looking at a financial report from the now-defunct Bear Stearns company in 2006, which he claims proves there were already far more immigrants than official tallies. He then extrapolated using the assumption that millions of people have been crossing the border illegally every year over that 20-year period — something he claims to have seen with his own eyes.
This entire thing is complete nonsense, wrote American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick.
"To give you some sense of how pants-on-head whacko this number is, it would mean there are somehow over 90 million people living in the country that the Census missed; that 1 in every 4 people was undocumented," wrote Reichlin-Melnick. "Also, the semi-official number isn’t 20 million, it’s 14 million."
Bovino's claims are easy to prove wrong just by looking at birth statistics, said Reichlin-Melnick.
"It’s a hard number to fake. Almost everyone gives birth in a hospital, and hospitals report all births. If 90 *million* extra people came over the last 30 years, births would be up massively. But they’re not!" he wrote. Moreover, "Last year there were under 1,000,000 babies born to Hispanic mothers. Given that number, Bovino’s laughable 107 million estimate would mean that Hispanic women in the US have the lowest fertility rate of any population ever recorded in human history."