The Guardian published an article on December 12 claiming that border crossings by illegal aliens are “near historic lows.” Actual numbers from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) indicate the opposite, however.

The article features a U.S. Border Patrol agent who was born in Mexico and became a naturalized U.S. citizen who also served this country as a F/A-18 aircraft mechanic aboard the USS Nimitz in the Persian Gulf.

Unfortunately, the glowing profile of the agent is riddled with conflation; misleading information; outright factual errors about the real status of the border between Mexico and the United States; the numbers of people crossing that border and being deported; and comments made by President-Elect Donald Trump during the presidential campaign.

The article appears to be an ongoing effort by its writer, Rory Carroll, to discredit the U.S. Border Patrol and minimize the human crisis that has been caused by drug cartels and self-proclaimed humanitarians opposed to securing the border.

Carroll writes, “The numbers crossing the border are near historic lows.” This is simply not true. A report by Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson in November, reported by Breitbart Texas on November 11, revealed that 408,870 illegal immigrants were apprehended crossing the southwest border during the most recent fiscal year which ended on September 30. This number represents an increase of about 77,000 over the previous year–nearly a 25 percent increase over FY 2015. It was the third largest number of crossings during the past five years.

Further, the new fiscal year kicked off with a continuation of the surge that has been building for several months. October 2016 saw a 17 percent increase in total apprehensions over the previous month of September. The numbers for September, 39,501, were far and away the highest September for the past five years, the CBP report states. August 2016 was also the highest August for the past five years.

Carroll’s claim that border crossings are “near historic lows” – FALSE.

His article also uses the oft-touted number that the Obama Administration has deported 2.5 million people which is inaccurate as well.

The reason the number is inaccurate, or at best misleading, is the Obama Administration cooked the books in advance of the 2012 presidential election to make it look like he was tough on illegal immigration.

Jessica Vaughn, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), reported in a detailed deportation analysis published in October 2013 that the Obama Administration was, for the first time, counting immigrants turned back at the border as “deportations.”

During FY 2012, two-thirds of aliens apprehended at the border “were processed as formal removal,” Vaughn reported, instead of the lower classification of “voluntary return.”

Historically, the vast majority of aliens apprehended by the Border Patrol were allowed to return rather than face removal. Programs that were set up in 2011 to process more border apprehension cases as formal removals were implemented with the stated purpose of deterring repeated crossing attempts. It had the side benefit of padding ICE’s removal statistics.

Another reason for the inflated numbers is Border Patrol’s being forced to re-deport aliens who have previously been removed because of the lack of a secured border.

“Once a tiny share of the Border Patrol case load, now about one-fourth of those arrested at the border are processed as reinstatements,” Vaughn wrote. “This could indicate that the rewards of illegal entry still are believed to outweigh the risk of apprehension, or the consequences of apprehension.”

Carroll’s claim that Obama deported 2.5 million people – MISLEADING or INACCURATE.

Carroll goes on to claim that Trump won the election by “conjuring an invasion of ‘illegals’ across an open border.”

CBP’s public numbers alone challenge this observation. There is a massive increase in the numbers of apprehensions, particularly in the numbers of Unaccompanied Alien Children “UAC,” and Family Unit Aliens (FMUA).

In the Breitbart Texas report of Secretary Johnson’s statistics, there was a 37 percent increase in the number of FMUAs apprehended compared to the previous month. UAC apprehensions were up by 19 percent when comparing the same periods. Part of this is the unsecured border that allows free migration from Mexico into the U.S. Another part is the push factor created by greedy drug cartels that used the 2016 presidential election as a marketing tool to get parents to turn their children over to them. A pull factor was also created by the Obama Administration’s policies of allowing thousands of illegal aliens to remain in the country after illegally crossing. Obama’s new Border Patrol Chief Mark Morgan admitted this pull factor when he testified before the U.S. Senate in November.

Carroll’s claim that Trump won the election by “conjuring an invasion of illegals” – FALSE

He went back to the fake news ploy of claiming that presidential candidate Trump called Mexicans “rapists” and “criminals.”

During a speech where he announced his candidacy in June 2015, Mr. Trump said:

The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems. It’s true, and these are the best and the finest. When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people. But I speak to border guards and they tell us what we’re getting. And it only makes common sense. It only makes common sense. They’re sending us not the right people. It’s coming from more than Mexico. It’s coming from all over South and Latin America, and it’s coming probably— probably— from the Middle East. But we don’t know. Because we have no protection and we have no competence, we don’t know what’s happening. And it’s got to stop and it’s got to stop fast.

Interested writers read this to mean that Trump was calling every Mexican arriving in the U.S. to be a rapist or a criminal. He later clarified these sentiments, breaking illegal immigrants into several groups–common criminals, rapists, drug smugglers, and decent people seeking a new home by any means.

A search outside of the echo chamber orbiting the pages of The Guardian easily exhibit a record of these daily episodes, when one chooses to look. Breitbart Texas has reported extensively on crimes, including drug smuggling, rape, and murder by previously deported criminal aliens, sex offenders and drug smugglers.

It’s not hard to find examples to illustrate this point. Most notably, the murder of Kate Steinle, the woman allegedly murdered in San Francisco in July 2015 by an illegal alien who had been deported several times, Breitbart News reported.

Last month, a 10-year-old girl in east Texas, Kayla Gomez-Orozco, was allegedly murdered by a Mexican national who was deported in 2014 for a “violent crime,” Breitbart Texas reported.

Many times, these previously-deported criminal aliens are caught at the border. Other times, they manage to trek deep into the country to commit other crimes. In September, Breitbart Texas reported that Nicondemo Coria-Gonzales, a Mexican national who had been deported five times, returned to Texas and allegedly committed a series of rapes and violent assaults against women in the Austin area.

Patterns of criminality perpetrated by those illegally present are often minimized by conflating crime statistics for all immigrants regardless of status, Breitbart Texas Managing Director Brandon Darby wrote shortly after these false attacks on Trump began. Darby wrote:

The recent Anderson Cooper interview with Trump began well, as Cooper used the term “illegal immigrants” to describe Trump’s comments and to set the parameters on the interview discussion. Though Cooper started the segment using the term “illegal immigration,” he quickly relied on a Pew Research Center study on “immigrants” and crime levels, not “illegal immigrants.” Trump missed the sly change, and the apples-to-apples debate morphed into an apples-to-oranges debate with one side unaware of the subtle, but significant, switch. Cooper appears to have based his argument off of a recent Salon article published a day prior to the aforementioned interview. The Salon article, “This proves Donald Trump is lying: Here are the actual facts on immigrants and crime,” also engaged in the deceptive sleight of hand to their readers. Their first sentence asserted, “Donald Trump opened his 2016 presidential campaign with an epic rant against Mexican immigrants.” A few sentences later and Salon doubled down on their dishonest assertion: “He went on to tell CNN that the threat lies not just with Mexican immigrants, but with immigrants in general.”

“Salon then tripled down,” Darby wrote:

Here is what you need to know: immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than people born in the United States. A 2013 Pew Research Center study found that across all people aged 12 to 24 (the teen and young adult years when almost all criminal activity first begins) immigrants were much less likely than the U.S.-born to have committed a crime in the last year.

Darby concluded that “by intentionally using the term ‘immigrant,’ Trump’s detractors battle a strawman. They cite studies focused on all immigrants, not just illegal aliens who enter the U.S. secretly and illegally. They mix statistics from legal immigrants with the far-fewer number of illegal aliens in the United States, causing the crime numbers to look better for illegal aliens.”

Carroll’s claim that Trump called all Mexicans rapists and criminals – FALSE

Bob Price serves as associate editor and senior political news contributor for Breitbart Texas. He is a founding member of the Breitbart Texas team. Follow him on Twitter @BobPriceBBTX.