About 40 days before the November election, President Joe Biden is out there claiming that his executive order from the summer has reduced illegal border crossings by a whopping 60%. This is according to a revised proclamation from Sept. 27, 2024, where Biden says his June 3 executive order “suspended and limited” noncitizen entries at the southern border during times when things were, well, getting out of hand.

The Biden administration’s orders reportedly sparked a sense of urgency in Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Attorney General Merrick Garland. This led them to swiftly implement a rule aimed at limiting asylum eligibility for those trying to enter the country unlawfully. Biden has recently expressed satisfaction with the outcome, stating that it has “already produced significant results.”

Biden also claimed that the average number of run-ins between the U.S. Border Patrol and people sneaking in at the southwest border has dropped by 59% since mid-May 2023. According to Biden, July and August 2024 were the two lowest months of these encounters since September 2020.

Oh, and let’s not forget some of the administration’s other claims. The Department of Homeland Security is now claiming that they have removed 70% of single adults and families who were caught crossing the border illegally, which amounts to about 119,000 people sent back to over 140 countries. Biden also says they have tripled the number of noncitizens who were quickly sent home and reduced the number of those who were caught and then released by 52%.

Since this June 3 order was so successful, Biden’s new proclamation will discontinue “the suspension and limitation on entry in that proclamation” only after Mayorkas says we’ve had 28 straight days of fewer than 1,500 border encounters. Oh, and he’s given Mayorkas a tight 14-day deadline to make this determination. The new order also counts unaccompanied minors from both neighboring and faraway countries when tallying illegal crossings.

Reports in August show a very different story, where more than 12.5 million illegal border crossers have since 2021, with two million dodging capture entirely. That’s not even counting over 1.3 million people released into the U.S. through parole programs that have Republicans throwing fits. Mayorkas has already been impeached by House Republicans for his handling of these programs, and attorneys general in Republican states have filed lawsuits calling them illegal.

Through two of these programs, around 813,000 people used the CBP One app, while another 530,000 were processed from countries like Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. Altogether, we’re looking at close to 14 million people. And there’s more: Republicans in Congress are crying foul over a dozen other programs that they say are also illegal. Senator John Cornyn even filed a bill demanding that the DHS fess up about how many people have been let in through these backdoor programs.

Republican lawmakers aren’t having it. Rep. Mark Green, head of the House Homeland Security Committee, blasted the administration, saying they’re playing a “massive shell game” by moving the crossings from between the ports of entry to the ports themselves. Green also mentioned: “Despite the false narrative they’re attempting to project, the unprecedented border crisis the president and his ‘border czar’ have created continues to rage on.”

Mark Morgan, a former CBP and Border Patrol chief, backed that claim up, calling it a sneaky way of shifting the crisis to the ports of entry. He says Biden’s just rebranding the problem, calling it a “new legal pathway” and claiming victory. According to Morgan, it’s nothing but a government-sponsored scam. Morgan said that the administration bragged about a “60% reduction in the flow of illegal aliens in-between the POEs; what you haven’t heard them mention is they’ve increased the flow at the POEs by 220%.”

And then there’s Biden’s latest claim that “the numbers are going down.” Morgan calls it political spin, saying the administration made a deal with migrants: stop sneaking in through the backdoor, and we’ll let you waltz in through the front door, pretending it’s all legal.

Additionally, Biden recently extended a 23-year-old national emergency due to terrorism at the same time as a record number of people on the terrorist watch list—1,856—were caught crossing the border. Naturally, this has people like Senator Ted Cruz demanding answers, worried that America is “living on borrowed time” as intelligence warnings about the border crisis pile up.