Exaggerated Claims by White Nationalists About Latino Migration to US
In the run-up to the 2024 election, Donald Trump promised, “We will close the border. We will stop the invasion of illegals into our country.” A year later, it was a promise he claimed to have kept. But exactly who are the “illegals”? Loose definitions and manipulated statistics tell a very misleading story about migrants from Latin America.
Earlier this year, a chart appeared on social media sites like X claiming that during President Biden’s four years in office, 8% of Nicaragua’s population entered the US illegally. The chart displayed comparable percentages for five other Latin American countries — Cuba, Haiti, Honduras, Venezuela and Guatemala. It appeared to confirm Trump’s claims that “Biden’s open border policies” had attracted people in such huge numbers that their countries had lost significant proportions of their populations.
Source: Pallesen’s chart, since deleted but found in various posts on Facebook and X.
The chart in question, with 4.6 million views on X, was the work of data scientist Jonatan Pallesen, so it might have been considered statistically accurate. Let’s look at how it was produced.
Pallesen used publicly available data from US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) showing numbers of CBP “encounters” with people entering the country. An “encounter” can refer to a person who crossed the border unlawfully or who claimed asylum at a border post. But it can also refer to someone who arrived at the border and was turned away by officials, failing to enter the US at all. Furthermore, someone making repeated attempts to enter the country may have several “encounters” and be separately logged each time by CBP officials.
CBP statistics, therefore, cannot be used to show the number of people making “illegal entries” because they have a significant but unknown element of double-counting.
For his chart, Pallesen also added in the half-million people who traveled to the US under a Biden-era parole program that applied to four of the six countries. This raised two further problems. One is that, by definition, these entrants to the US were – at the time – perfectly legal. But, more importantly, the CBP had already included these entries in their data showing encounters. So there was an additional, even bigger element of double-counting in Pallesen’s chart.
It is not surprising that Pallesen ended up with huge figures for “illegal entries” over the years in question (2021-24). He must have decided that they would seem even more dramatic if they were expressed as a percentage of each country’s population. This pushed Nicaragua to the top of the chart, whereas in terms of actual numbers of encounters it would be at the bottom.
Pallesen’s X account reveals his motivation in posting such patently bogus data. His screeds are full of anti-immigrant talking points. He has published articles jointly with academics criticized as “eugenicists, or scientific racists” whose work is being “appropriated in the service of alt-right and White nationalist ideas.”
The chart may be wildly wrong, but it has served its purpose in feeding an anti-immigrant message. Indeed, it has been reproduced many times, including by Donald Trump Jr., who said Pallesen’s chart showed Biden’s policies to have been “absolute insanity.”
In April, Pallesen’s work was examined by the rumor fact-check site Snopes. Analyst Jack Izzo described it as “meaningless” and the chart as full of “flaws.” Expressing the numbers as percentages of each country’s population is the equivalent of “dividing apples by oranges,” he added. The chart has been withdrawn, but Snopes found plentiful examples of it still being used.
The political misuse of data like Pallesen’s is not confined to anti-immigrant nationalists. Similar exaggerated claims are used to criticize the governments of three of the countries from which the migrants originate.
Let’s look first at Nicaragua. An NGO based in Costa Rica claims that an even higher proportion of Nicaragua’s population – 11.6%, equivalent to 800,000 people – left the country over the period 2018-2025. This NGO has received over $282,000 in US federal grants to create anti-Nicaragua propaganda, so naturally it attributes this exodus to the government’s “systematic repression.”
Prominent opposition figure Manuel Orozco goes further, accusing Nicaragua of the “expulsion of almost a million people between 2018 and 2024” – a startling 15% of the population. As well as emigrants to the US, these figures include a substantial number said to have fled to Costa Rica, where 300,000 Nicaraguans have claimed asylum.
The absurdity of these claims in Nicaragua’s case can be demonstrated by simple analysis of the country’s population figures, available in the UN data portal. In 2018, its resident population was 6.4 million; over the period 2018-25, the “natural” population growth (births minus deaths) was 790,000, so without migration the 2025 population would have been 7.2 million. In fact, it was around 180,000–190,000 below that figure, at just over 7 million. The balance is explained by net migration (the difference between people leaving and people entering): at around 180,000–190,000, it was just 3% of the population over a longer period, 2018-25.
The real loss of population is therefore much less than half of Pallesen’s percentage and far below the figures claimed by opposition pundits. Apart from double counting, the main reason for this huge discrepancy is that large numbers of Nicaraguans return home. They do not stay permanently in either the US or Costa Rica. While data for people leaving the US (for example, around 10,000 have been deported by Trump) are only partial, UN figures show that migration to Costa Rica is circular – as many Nicaraguans leave as enter on a weekly basis.
Another of Pallesen’s claims is that over one million Venezuelans entered the US “illegally” in the four years 2021-25. Writing in the Anti-Empire Project, Joe Emersberger and Justin Podur examine a range of estimates for Venezuelan emigration, including a BBC estimate that over seven million have emigrated since 2015. They conclude that “nobody should accept the migration figures for Venezuela that the western media constantly cites.” They quote a typical US media figure as saying that “the misery and repression that Venezuela has suffered at the hands of Maduro’s dictatorship has caused millions to flee.” Yet analysis by the Centre for Economic and Policy Research shows that four million Venezuelans have emigrated as a direct result of US policy in the form of “sanctions” – unilateral coercive measures imposed by the US and its allies.
Pallesen also suggests that over 800,000 “illegal” entrants to the US since 2021 came from Cuba. Scrutiny of the data suggests that in the period 2021-24 some 600,000 Cubans attempted to enter the US, and many of these will be double-counted or have made failed attempts. However, Cuba’s case is somewhat different because it is not the scale but the reasons for migration that are disputed. Cuban government officials accept analyses by experts such as Juan Carlos Albizu-Campos Espiñeira of the University of Havana, who assesses Cuba’s population loss since the end of 2020 at 10.1 per cent. The primary driver is arguably the enormous damage caused by the six-decade US blockade of the country. Yet academic commentators outside Cuba, such as Agustina Rodríguez Granja, blame migration entirely on the government’s economic mismanagement and on “political repression.”
The real picture then is that migration from Nicaragua is minimal, once returnees are taken into account. In the case of both Venezuela and Cuba, outward migration is very significant, but it is driven by hostile policies pursued by successive US administrations, including Trump’s.
As is clear from his background, Pallesen’s exaggerated claims about “illegal entrants” to the US and their repetition in social media come from anti-immigrant or White supremacist sentiments. Writing in Black Agenda Report, Margaret Kimberley points out that Trump’s immigration enforcement is a doomed attempt “to make America whiter again.” Accepting handfuls of refugees appears to be acceptable, she adds, if they are White people “escaping” South Africa.
Similar claims to Pallesen’s from opponents of socialist governments in Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba have different political perspectives although there may be some degree of overlap. Their attacks on their own countries of origin feed Trump’s narrative about excessive numbers of Latino immigrants in the US. In the case of one of the most prominent opponents of socialist governments, Venezuelan Maria Corina Machado, her support for Trump’s policies was unconditional even when he was illegally deporting her compatriots to prisons in El Salvador.
Migration as an issue has been deeply weaponized. Alarmism about the numbers of migrants who have arrived in the US from Latin American countries has brought together two, previously distinct elements of right-wing politics. Both are purveying myths, not facts, and it is important to challenge them.
The Never-ending Nightmare of the Border Wall
A leading preoccupation of the first Trump administration has all but slipped from view. Except when ostensible conservatives speak out against it, the major media have scarcely breathed a word on the subject. But it’s still there, 30 feet tall, aspirationally 1,952 miles long, obliterating habitats, dividing families, and sucking down public funds faster than a carrier-based air squadron.
The media’s lack of attention is understandable. All-too-real wars of choice and metaphorical wars against science, universities, and the environment have dominated our airtime and the headlines. The rise of a new medievalism in medicine and the abrogation of international trade and security agreements have also won attention. Add to all of that a federal paramilitary kidnapping people, even from what still passes for the halls of justice, while murdering the occasional protester, and one’s journalistic cup runneth over.
The meta-story of the U.S. government’s comprehensive abandonment of its Enlightenment heritage needs telling, too. Goodbye to empiricism and the troublesome scientific discourse it produces. Goodbye as well to empiricism’s political collaterals, including the “created equal” credo of the Declaration of Independence, which the current regime finds distinctly irritating. There is simply too much to report on as the new monarchy, as if in a sped-up nature film, blossoms flowerlike, its palace under renovation, the king’s signature being prepared to grace the currency, and myriad kickback mechanisms whirring like gold-plated turbines to enrich an aristocracy of tech bros and oil emirs.
So, dear reader, it’s not just logical but inevitable that Donald Trump’s border wall, a major story during his first administration, has essentially fallen out of the news. Rest assured, though, that the world’s least pragmatic and most performative construction project continues to prosper.
Spend Now, Think Later
Modern border management relies on three tools: human patrols, remote detection backed by quick response teams, and the construction of physical obstacles. Smart gatekeepers coordinate those tools to maximize effectiveness and minimize cost. But there’s no need for thrift in Trumpworld. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, or OBBBA, which Trump signed into law last July 4th, negated all need for fiscal restraint. Among other things, it appropriated $46.55 billion for border wall construction, $7.8 billion for U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents and their vehicles, $6.2 billion for high-tech border surveillance, and a hefty $10 billion for anything else border-related. The total: $70.55 billion. Those funds will be available through Fiscal Year 2029. By comparison, the government will spend about $10 billion less over that same period to fund the entire Department of the Interior, which manages half a billion acres of surface land as well as the continental shelf and vast subsurface mineral deposits.
Such border largesse means that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) can go all-out on all three tactical approaches at the U.S.-Mexico border — patrol, surveillance, and a wall — simultaneously, without troubling to eliminate redundancies, tailor tactics to the environment, or streamline coordination. Daddy has proudly given DHS his credit card.
In a victory-lap cabinet meeting four days after enacting the OBBBA, Trump told Kristi Noem, then still his DHS secretary, “You’re loaded up on the border.” He essentially admitted that the bill’s munificence demonstrated power, not budgetary acumen, simultaneously adding, “We had zero [migrants] come in last month, so I am not sure how much of it we want to spend. You may actually think about saving a lot of money because the wall is largely built.” The president then continued with fact-free claims that the migrant population abounded with murderers and mental defectives.
Notwithstanding Trump’s comments, DHS administrators and the contractors who are their most immediate constituents show no sign of leaving money on the table. At the border, their blank-check funding meets a matching regulatory void — the most extensive waiver of laws and regulations in American history. In addition to suspending laws intended to protect the environment, wildlife, national parks, national wildlife refuges, lands sacred to Native Americans, and historic and cultural sites, the Trump administration has also waived more than 60 contracting and procurement regulations. In the name of a national emergency, which is no emergency at all — illegal border crossings (as measured by apprehensions) have indeed plunged — the president has stripped the playing field of all boundaries and opened the door to cronyism and corruption.
Under showers of money and in the absence of restraint, a single border wall is no longer viewed as adequate. Double-walling has become the norm and certain select areas now boast triple walls. With no cap on costs, whole mountaintops, rugged and unvisited, have been sheared apart to make way for the standard 30-foot-tall, steel-bollard wall, even at costs exceeding $41 million per mile, or almost $8,000 per foot. Meanwhile, the Border Patrol’s terminally bored agents (giving new meaning to bored-er) sit behind the wall in white trucks, looking at their phones and incubating their hemorrhoids.
The Non-Monetary Costs Are No Less Astronomical
It’s easy to think of the mostly arid U.S.-Mexico border zone as empty, but biologically it’s a busy place. The grasslands of the San Rafael Valley in Arizona, for instance, are home to 17 threatened and endangered species. For years, existing vehicle barriers, bolstered by remote detection technology, have allowed jaguars, ocelots, mountain lions, mule deer, and other wildlife to move back and forth across the valley’s 30 miles of border and disperse according to their ancient ways. A network of 60 remote cameras along that stretch, monitored by the Sky Island Alliance, recorded just one possible migrant per camera every 20 months. Besides being easily patrolled, the valley is also heart-stoppingly beautiful. Nonetheless, DHS intends to double-wall all of it. In addition to bifurcating the wildlife habitat and scarring a gemlike landscape, the wall builders will extract large amounts of groundwater to make concrete for the wall’s foundation, almost certainly desiccating wetlands that are hotspots of biodiversity. And for nothing, save symbolism, bragging rights, and contractor profits.
No detail illuminates the mentality behind border enforcement better than this: in cooperation with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, military elements at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, are now engaged in “the largest Concertina wire (C-wire) emplacement in U.S. territorial history.” “C-wire,” or “razor wire,” is designed to lacerate any flesh, human or animal, that comes in contact with it. Fort Huachuca soldiers are deploying 43,000 rolls of it, the largest single purchase ever.
Usually C-wire is used atop a wall or fence to prevent people from climbing over. Ominously, it’s now being spread on the ground, sometimes in areas where there is no wall, but also in front of the wall and between double walls — a policy of pure viciousness, not necessity. Someone should explain this deployment to the bighorn sheep of California’s Jacumba Mountains, which are now separated from their key Mexican waterhole by thickets of the nasty stuff, which will become ever more camouflaged and treacherous as grass and brush grow through it.
Buoy, Oh, Buoy, What a Wall!
For treachery, however, it’s hard to top CBP’s plans to “secure” 536 miles of the border in Texas by mooring a chain of cylindrical buoys, linked end to end, down the middle of the Rio Grande. Once in place, the array will look like an orange sausage, five feet in diameter, floating on the river. The anchors and mooring lines, of course, will be invisible. What could possibly go wrong?
This ill-conceived plan offers a retro-snapshot of American life before the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) became law in 1970, back when strip mines and other land-wrecking ventures could be launched with no evaluation of their impact, no public involvement, and no second opinions as to their necessity. The waiver of NEPA and every other environmental constraint means that no modeling of the “Buoy Wall’s” hydrodynamics (that is, its reaction to flooding), if any exists, has been made public.
The Rio Grande International Study Center in Laredo, Texas, however, commissioned its own study. The results are unequivocal. The Buoy Wall will be a debris trap during floods, as when a hurricane lodges over the region. It will redirect flows of water and raise water levels, especially in places where it’s paired with river-crowding segments of the wall. And if a section of buoys should break loose from the sandy, unstable riverbed, the likelihood of disaster will soar.
Geomorphologist Mark Tompkins, who authored the report, concludes, “Failures will cause catastrophic flooding, damage and destruction to property, and risks to the health and safety of people near the river corridor.” Thousands of people living adjacent to the river in Laredo and other communities in both Mexico and the U.S. will be put at risk.
Conflicts Brewed and Brewing
Walls have their place. They can be effective in urban areas. But DHS startled more than a few onlookers with plans to build a wall among the cliffs and arid wildlands of Big Bend National Park. Even the sheriffs of West Texas, one of the reddest regions in the country, got riled up. Although DHS may yet fall back to a more sensible “detection technology” alternative for the national park, it has failed to communicate a clear decision, while nearby private lands and Big Bend Ranch State Park remain at risk.
Even worse uncertainty may be brewing in Arizona, where the lands of the Tohono O’odham people, whose presence predates the border by many centuries, are spread on either side of the line. The tribe’s exemplary cooperation with border authorities includes tribal enforcement teams that have helped keep illegal crossings at a historic low. But the rigid minds and hungry contractors of the “CBP industrial complex” remain unsatisfied. The agency’s “smart wall map” indicates that it aims to build a double wall across the Tohono O’odham reservation, splitting apart families, clans, and longstanding webs of relationship.
And then there’s the unhappy Roman Catholic Diocese of Las Cruces, which serves Sunland Park, New Mexico. Walls have long separated El Paso and Sunland Park from the Mexican city of Ciudad Juárez. However, there is an unwalled gap at Monte Cristo Rey, a steep-sided peak long considered impractical for barrier construction. Not now, though. Blasting for the Border Wall began on Cristo Rey in March, in time to appall the thousands of Holy Week pilgrims who visit the statue of Christ the King on the mountain’s summit.
The land available to CBP, however, is not sufficient to finish the job on Cristo Rey, and the adjacent landowner, the Catholic Church, refuses to sell. CBP claims it may assert the right of eminent domain, while the church has said it will fight, although its best tool for resistance, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, has predictably been among the many laws waived by DHS.
Orgasms for Birders
On a recent trip to the border, I visited one of the most exquisite places in the entire Southwest. To get to it, I drove 40 miles on dirt roads across broken, arroyo-carved desert. The Border Wall was almost always in sight.
Apart from the roadway itself, the commonest evidence of a human presence were signs at the approach to each arroyo: DO NOT ENTER WHEN FLOODED, which is good advice in an area where flash floods from local thunderstorms can sweep away a heavy truck. All the arroyos that the road crosses are also crossed by the Border Wall. Floods pile tons of debris against the wall and sometimes the accumulated weight is enough to push the structure down. CBP continues to experiment with designs for swinging water gates, but a durable solution remains unproven.
Between a pair of “lay-bys” — bulldozed flats where the wall contractor has assembled fleets of eighteen-wheelers, excavators, scrapers, dumpers, pickups, bulldozers, loaders, and cement trucks — I veered down a rough track to a steel gate and let myself in. A little way beyond that, I stopped my car beside a lazy creek at the bottom of a canyon. White-barked sycamores and cottonwoods, just coming into leaf, towered overhead. Amid their shadows, the air smelled of duff and wet sand. The birds were not just singing, they were yelling. When I opened a birding app on my phone, the bird-call IDs scrolled by like movie credits.
The canyon has a perfectly good name, but I’ll call it Paradox Canyon in recognition of the contrast between the vigorous life it contains and the brutalist-walled horizon looming above it. During the first Trump administration, the nearest mountain peak was cleaved open like a watermelon, leaving the landscape not just scarred but grotesquely amputated.
The current contractor, Fisher Industries, is no stranger to disassembling and rearranging mountains. Besides installing the standard bollard wall, Fisher is pouring a concrete patrol road at the foot of the wall, portions of which, rising above Paradox Canyon, are so steep that, absent the paving, no wheeled vehicle can climb it.
The next mountain, however, is too steep even for a patrol road. The previous contractor’s employees dubbed the peak “Widow Maker,” and the zigzag scars of switchbacks and ledges by which they gained access to the path of the wall make it easy to understand why.
Fisher is the largest player in the wall-building business. Based in North Dakota, it was the contractor for “We Build the Wall,” a crowd-funded enterprise that got its promoters, including Steve Bannon, a longtime Trump ally, convicted for fraud. “We Build the Wall” funded Fisher to build 3.5 miles of wall on private land beside the Rio Grande near Mission, Texas. The Department of Justice and the International Boundary Waters Commission subsequently sued Fisher for shoddy work and violation of the boundary treaty with Mexico. The suit has since been settled, with Fisher having agreed to make immediate repairs and carry out future repairs subject to the forfeit of a $3-million bond.
The Paradox Canyon rancher whom I came to visit is philosophical about the wall. The assault on his land began at the end of Trump I and, after a Biden-era pause, has resumed at full strength. The “shock and awe” accompanying Trump’s resumption of office, he says, left no room for negotiating a more sensible path forward. He believes that the symbolism of the wall is its real power, as it channels the fears of the MAGA faithful. The wall, he says, stands for more than shutting out migrants and narcos. It stands for shutting out other complex things, possibly complexity itself. It represents Trump’s promise to his base that their worldview will be fulfilled.
Making War at Home and Abroad
My rancher friend feels that his present task is to weather the storm of wall-building and await a time when wiser heads prevail, when the rush to spend and build might yield to thoughtful redesign, when gaps for wildlife might be installed and properly monitored, and when the wall’s proponents and its enemies might find a “third path.”
Meanwhile, the excavators, scrapers, bulldozers, and haulers carry on. From concertina wire to counter-functional buoys, from mountain blasting to free-wheeling billion-dollar contracts, the mindset behind the wall is the same as that which spawned the Iran war. Both are exercises in unchecked power. Both were conceived with disdain for the complexities of the real world. Both serve rhetorical as much as tangible purposes.
The war with Iran has confounded Trump’s expectation of a quick victory. Thousands of gravestones will be its monument. The Border Wall, in its own slow way, will provide another sort of monument. It won’t be the graves of those who died crossing it or flanking it by sea, for they will rarely be marked at all. And it won’t be the local extinctions of plants or animals, for they will simply vanish. It will instead be a tottering, linear, soulless version of Stonehenge — think of it as America’s Steelhenge — built on sand and made of haste, fear, and avarice.
It will memorialize Trump’s success in making America less and less great.
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