In June 2015, Donald Trump descended that Trump Tower escalator and announced his first presidential bid. In his remarks, he made the infamous comment about Mexico “not sending their best” people here. Here’s the really “bad” part: “They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with [them]. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”

Leftists went into hysterics, calling him racist and xenophobic. But he was right.

He wasn’t making a literal statement about every person who crosses our southern border but a general observation about some of the people. Leftists took him hyper-literally in order to smear him rather than admit the border was a problem. It’s a huge problem, as evidenced by a new report on criminal statistics among illegal border crossers. I’ll get back to that in a minute.

Here we are in 2024, nearly four years into the intentional invasion crafted by Joe Biden and Border Czar Kamala Harris. To address this crisis, she spent 20 minutes Friday visiting the border to pretend (A) that she cares and (B) that she has nothing to do with it. CNN analyst Scott Jennings gets it, saying of Harris’s trip, “Arsonist returns to scene of crime.” Worse, it’s like an arsonist insisting that a house would be safer with kindling stuffed in the crawl space.

Instead, Harris incredibly insists, it’s Trump’s fault. “In the four years that Donald Trump was president,” she claimed, “he did nothing to fix our broken immigration system.” Roughly three million illegals crossed during Trump’s term, compared to at least 10 million during Harris’s — after she and Biden undid all of Trump’s successful policies. Nevertheless, she insisted he’s a horrible human being: “He separated families, he ripped toddlers out of their mothers’ arms, put children in cages, and tried to end protections for Dreamers.”

That’s all either flagrantly false or a gross exaggeration to the point of falsehood.

She also repeated the lie that Trump “tanked” the bad immigration bill in Congress earlier this year. That legislation was a cynical game for Democrats. They filled it with open-border poison pills to provoke Republicans to vote against it so that Democrats could then blame Republicans for the Biden/Harris border crisis.

So what will Harris do when (ahem) she’s in charge? “The United States is a sovereign nation, and I believe we have a duty to set rules at our border and to enforce them,” she later added at a rally. “And I take that responsibility very seriously.”

Her nearly four-year record as vice president says otherwise.

If elected, she promises to be tough, though. She aims to “reduce illegal border crossings” and ensure that those who do cross “will be apprehended and removed and barred from reentering for five years.” How about starting that TODAY?

What about those who broke the law and evaded detention or deportation for a long time? She wants “a pathway to citizenship” for them. She also wants a bigger and easier path for more asylum claims.

So, back to the question of Trump’s characterization of who’s coming in.

ICE Deputy Director Patrick Lechleitner sent a letter to Texas Republican Representative Tony Gonzalez with some eye-popping statistics about illegal alien crime. Gonzalez posted that letter Friday.

“As of July 21, 2024,” Lechleitner wrote, “there were 662,566 noncitizens with criminal histories on ICE’s national docket, which includes those detained by ICE, and on the agency’s non-detained docket. Of those, 435,719 are convicted criminals, and 226,847 have pending criminal charges.” He included a chart to illustrate.

Fox News summarizes that chart: “Those include 62,231 convicted of assault, 14,301 convicted of burglary, 56,533 with drug convictions and 13,099 convicted of homicide. An additional 2,521 have kidnapping convictions and 15,811 have sexual assault convictions. There are an additional 1,845 with pending homicide charges, 42,915 with assault charges, 3,266 with burglary charges and 4,250 with assault charges.”

The timeframe of crime and border crossing isn’t clear. What is clear is that a huge number of crimes — this is a key point — would not have happened if the illegal alien perpetrator were not in the United States in the first place. Every person who crosses the border illegally has committed a crime. Far too many of them end up doing worse once they get here.

It’s also clear that Biden and Harris made it worse. As Fox News’s Bill Melugin notes, “Not all of these criminals entered during the Biden admin, as some are claiming. The data doesn’t show when the more than 425,000+ convicted criminal noncitizens on the non-detained docket entered — but as of August 2016, the DHS OIG shows just over 368,000 convicted criminals were already on the non-detained docket. Some of these criminals go back many years across multiple administrations.”

Harris speaks with more conviction about abortion than any other issue, demanding the unfettered “right” to kill unborn children, especially in cases of rape and incest. Yet her administration allowed millions of illegal aliens into the country, some number of whom are charged with nearly 16,000 instances of sexual assault. Thousands of American women — citizens — have been subjected to unspeakable crimes at the hands of illegals. Border Czar Kamala Harris opened the border and apparently thinks they’ll all be fine if only they can abort any resulting children.

More than 13,000 murders were committed by illegals. Many of those victims would be alive today were it not for Harris’s bloody border policies.

“It may be shocking to hear that the Biden-Harris administration is actively releasing tens of thousands of criminal illegal aliens into our communities, but their own numbers conclusively prove this to be the case. This defies all common sense,” noted House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green. “Under President Biden and his ‘border czar,’ Vice President Harris, DHS law enforcement has been directed to mass-release illegal aliens whom they know have criminal convictions or are facing charges for serious crimes — and these dangerous, destructive individuals are making their way into every city and state in this country. How many more Americans need to die or be victimized before this administration is forced to abide by the laws they swore to uphold? This is madness. It is something no civilized, well-functioning society should tolerate.”

Follow Nate Jackson on X/Twitter.