Trump said Biden let millions cross the border with no vetting
Trump said millions crossed the border illegally under Biden with no checks whatsoever. This is mixed. Crossings were high, but the claim that no vetting occurred is false, and Biden significantly tightened enforcement in his final year.
What we know
Trump stated that under President Biden, millions of people crossed the US border illegally with no vetting or checks of any kind.
The underlying picture is more complicated. Border encounters were indeed high for much of the Biden administration, so the claim of large numbers is grounded in real data. However, the specific assertion that there were no checks at all is false. People encountered at the border are processed, screened and recorded, even when large numbers are involved.
In addition, in the final year of his term Biden tightened border enforcement significantly through executive action, and crossings fell. Because the volume claim has some basis but the "no vetting" framing is inaccurate, fact-checkers treated this as a partly true, partly false statement rather than a clean falsehood.
US Customs and Border Protection publishes monthly encounter statistics that show the scale of the border enforcement challenge during the Biden administration was real: encounters reached historically high levels in 2022 and 2023 before falling sharply after tightened asylum restrictions took effect in mid-2024. However, every recorded encounter involves biographic and biometric processing, including fingerprinting and database checks against criminal, immigration, and terrorism watchlists, which is the standard meaning of vetting in this context. NPR's fact-check of the State of the Union speech found no credible evidence supporting the specific claim that these checks were entirely absent, even though the sheer volume of encounters strained processing capacity and led to documented delays and gaps in some individual cases.
The claim illustrates a common pattern in immigration debates where a real underlying statistic, in this case historically high border encounters, is combined with a much stronger and less accurate claim, that no screening occurred at all, to create a more alarming overall picture. Fact-checkers treat these compound claims differently from simple falsehoods because part of the statement reflects genuine, documented conditions while another part misrepresents established government procedure, which is why the claim was rated as partly true rather than entirely false. CBP's published methodology for encounter processing, which includes standardized biometric intake at processing centers, means the claim of zero vetting is checkable against a specific, described government procedure rather than an abstract policy debate, which is part of why fact-checkers were able to rate that specific portion of the claim as unsupported even while acknowledging the volume figures were roughly accurate. Immigration policy researchers separately note that debates over the adequacy of vetting, as opposed to its complete absence, are a legitimate and ongoing policy discussion, since processing capacity strain during surges in encounters is a documented operational challenge distinct from the stronger and inaccurate claim that no screening occurred at all. CBP data remains publicly available for anyone who wants to check the figures directly.
Common claims
- Millions crossed illegally under Biden.Partly true
- There were no checks or vetting at all.Not supported