The Trump-supporting website has accused Guardian US of reporting ‘fake news’ about illegal immigration. Here, we set out the facts behind the original article

How Breitbart and the conservative right opened a new front in the war over fake news

In an effort to deny the reality of immigration trends on the southern US border, Breitbart News claimed to have “fact-checked” a Guardian profile of a Border Patrol agent, which they blasted as “fake news”.

The rightwing site accused the Guardian of disseminating false information for reporting a fundamental and demonstrably provable fact: that the number of undocumented border crossers is near a historic low.

In so doing, Breitbart also appeared to foreshadow an emerging line of attack from Trump loyalists against journalists and media organizations who don’t adhere to the president-elect’s version of events. On Tuesday, this sentiment was loudly proclaimed by Newt Gingrich, a longtime advocate for the president-elect, who said that Trump supporters were entering a “world in which we get to tell the truth”.

In a speech on “The Principles of Trumpism” at the Heritage Foundation, Gingrich targeted the legitimacy of a critical media, singling out the New York Times and the Washington Post as publications prone to lying. “These people are not news people, they are not reporters, they are propagandists. They write junk and they write junk with a deliberate leftwing bias and we ought to just take them to task every single time they do it.”

Breitbart’s full-throated attack on the Guardian article appeared to be a direct manifestation of Gingrich’s stated aim.

In the “fact-check” article, published on Monday, Breitbart called the fact that the number of undocumented border crossers is near a historic low – a cornerstone of any informed debate about illegal immigration – “false” and claimed it was part of a liberal media campaign to mislead readers. The article echoed President-elect Trump’s consistent depiction of a lawless and overrun border.

Until recently, Steve Bannon, a top adviser during the president-elect’s campaign and an incoming senior White House aide, was Breitbart’s CEO and guiding hand. Bannon has acknowledged that Breitbart’s website has been a gathering point for extremists of the “alt-right”. The site often ignites virulent rightwing argument with scant consideration for facts.

Here, we refute Breitbart’s claims about the original Guardian story, which the site called a mix of falsehoods, inaccuracies and misleading information designed to minimise the “crisis” of an unsecured border.

It had four main points, each summarised and analysed below.

1. The Guardian reported that the numbers of people crossing illegally at the southern border “are near historic lows”. But this claim was “simply not true”, Breitbart claimed, because 408,870 people were apprehended crossing the south-west border this fiscal year, nearly a 25% increase from last year. It was the third-largest number of crossings during the past five years.

It is true that numbers have recently risen. But they remain historically low. According to Border Patrol data the number of apprehensions on the Mexican border – a barometer for border crossings – averaged 523,000 a year in the 1970s, 999,000 in the 1980s, 1.26m in the 1990s and 1m in the 2000s.

The most recent apprehension numbers: 463,382 (2010), 340,252 (2011), 364,768 (2012), 420,780 (2013), 486,651 (2014), 337,117 (2015).

As the Pew Research Center noted, this coincides with data from Mexico’s statistics agency showing that the rate at which Mexicans migrated to the US and other countries – legally and illegally – has held steady for the past five years after a dramatic drop during the recession.

2. Breitbart faults the Guardian for using the oft-cited statistic that the Obama administration deported a record 2.5 million people, saying this is misleading or inaccurate because authorities have “inflated” the number by including a category of border crossers which used to be counted as “returned” rather than formally deported.



It is true that authorities are now prosecuting and often jailing more border crossers before formally deporting them, whereas in previous eras most were swiftly returned to Mexico with little formality. If you include returnees as well as deportees, the Clinton and Bush administrations sent back far more people than the Obama administration.

But the fact remains that Obama has formally deported more than his predecessors. This table from the Department of Homeland Security’s annual yearbook of immigration statistics shows the record going back to 1892.

One reason formal deportations have risen is deterrence. The strategy is to punish illicit border crossing with months or even years in jail. Another reason is demographic shifts. The number of Mexicans trying to cross has plunged while the numbers from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador have surged. They latter cannot simply be dumped back across the Rio Grande.

3. Breitbart claims it is “fake news” to say Trump conjured an invasion because the invasion is real. Its main evidence is a “massive increase in the numbers of apprehensions, particularly in the numbers of Unaccompanied Alien Children ‘UAC’ and Family Unit Aliens (FMUA)”.

Family unit apprehensions are indeed at a historical high and UAC apprehensions are surging back to levels seen in 2014. Most are from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. Combined, however, these arrivals make up about a third of total apprehensions, and that overall figure, as noted above, is near historic lows.

There are multiple reasons for the decline in border crossings since 2000, including tighter border security, a relatively weak US economy and Mexico’s falling fertility rate. Last year, more Mexicans left the US than entered, according to the Pew Research Center.

The number of undocumented immigrants is falling. From a peak of 12.2m in 2007, representing 4% of the population, the estimate is now at 11.1m, 3.5% of the population.

4. Breitbart accuses the Guardian of using “the fake news ploy” of claiming Trump called all Mexicans rapists and criminals whereas in fact he grouped undocumented Mexicans into common criminals, rapists, drug smugglers and decent people seeking a better life. The Guardian did not say he referred to all Mexicans.

Breitbart also said that, in any case, “criminal aliens” do rape, rob and murder, and cited examples. It lambasted CNN and Salon for reporting a study that showed immigrants were less likely to commit crime than US-born citizens, saying media outlets twisted this to absolve undocumented immigrants when in fact the study referred to all immigrants.

In vowing to promptly remove 2-3 million criminal aliens, Trump appears to draw on, and inflate, the 1.9 million non-citizens identified by Homeland Security as removable criminal aliens.

However, most of those 1.9 million are here legally. Only 820,000 are undocumented, according to an analysis by the nonprofit Immigration Policy Center. Which means that of 10 million undocumented adults in the US, 8.2% have a criminal record and 3% have committed a felony. The respective rates for the US adult population are 27.8% and 8.6%.

This matches other research – including from the Public Policy Institute of California, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and Justice Quarterly – which details lower offending and incarceration rates for all immigrants.