During the vice presidential debate on Tuesday night (Oct. 4), Republican running mate Mike Pence proclaimed that Hillary Clinton wants to continue president Barack Obama’s policy of “open borders” and total amnesty for undocumented immigrants.
This is probably one of the more egregious falsehoods asserted by the Indiana governor, aside from brazenly denying a number of on-the-record quotes delivered by his running mate, Donald Trump. The administration of Barack Obama has overseen more deportations than any other presidency in US history.
According to Julia Preston of The New York Times, “illegal border crossings overall have dropped to the lowest levels since the early 1970s, with the number of Mexicans caught at the border at the lowest level since the late 1960s” over the last year.
Hillary Clinton supports comprehensive immigration reform, which includes defending president Obama’s executive actions over the last eight years. Indeed, her campaign also supports a path to citizenship, particularly for families consisting of undocumented parents and native-born children. But to say that a Clinton White House would disintegrate America’s frontiers and allow free-for-all border-crossing is, at best, a radical stretching of the truth.