The Democrats don’t like to discuss specific facts about illegal immigration — but that’s only because the facts are so contrary to their preferred version of reality.

For more than two years, liberal lawmakers in Washington have done everything possible to misrepresent President Donald Trump’s stance on border security, arguing that the growing immigration crisis is nothing but a figment of the president’s imagination.

In a recent interview with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, for instance, Democratic presidential candidate Julian Castro declared that the border crisis is “BS,” arguing that we “need to increase the number of refugees we are letting into this country.”

Other prominent Democrats have echoed this sentiment in the past, portraying Trump as a racist politician who “manufactured” the border crisis in order to justify building an “immoral” border wall.

Sadly, there’s a lot that the Democrats aren’t telling you when it comes to illegal immigration.

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The Democrats aren’t telling you that while the “consensus” (i.e., media-approved) estimate is that there are around 12 million illegal immigrants living in the U.S., some scholars have calculated that the actual figure could be much higher — perhaps as many as 29.1 million.

To make matters worse, Democrats are also suspiciously silent about the fact that we’re on pace to add another 1.2 million illegal aliens by the end of this year, and that our Border Patrol officials are at a “breaking point,” in desperate need of additional resources to handle the influx.

The Democrats aren’t telling you that illegal immigrants cost American taxpayers about $116 billion per year in government benefits, even after factoring in the taxes they pay, or that each illegal alien residing in the U.S. imposes an annual fiscal burden of around $8,075.

The Democrats are not telling you that this gargantuan figure is just a small part of the overall cost of illegal immigration. The opioid crisis, which is directly tied to the illegal drug trade, has cost us more than $1 trillion since 2001, on top of the tragic loss of life that has devastated so many families.

The Democrats aren’t telling you that Trump’s wall will easily pay for itself if it manages to prevent just 60,000 border crossings.

The Democrats aren’t telling you that 89 percent of Border Patrol agents believe that a physical barrier on the southern border is “necessary.”

The Democrats aren’t even telling you that ruthless drug cartels are making between $19 billion and $29 billion every year by exploiting our inadequate border security to smuggle narcotics into the country.

They don’t mention that the cartels are using those profits to fund an ongoing drug war that has already claimed tens of thousands of innocent lives and shaken Mexico’s society and government to the core.

Nothing about these facts is “BS,” and nothing about this crisis is “manufactured.” These are real statistics about a real catastrophe that has been unfolding in front of our very eyes for years and is literally getting worse by the day.

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Instead of working to find solutions, however, the Democrats have obstinately refused to even acknowledge that illegal immigration might be a problem. Some, such as Julian Castro, have even tried to convince us that illegal immigrants “aren’t a threat to national security.”

While the facts flatly contradict their fantasies about the humanitarian and security catastrophe at the border, the Democrats aren’t about to let trivialities such as the truth sully their carefully-crafted talking points and political agenda for the 2020 election.

Tom Tancredo is a former U.S. Congressman for Colorado.

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