How Trump credits an immigration map with saving his life – and what’s missing from the map

The graphic helps the Republican presidential candidate connect an iconic moment from his 2024 campaign to his most important issue since entering politics. It’s also representative of how Trump’s campaign has approached immigration, vocally advocating for tougher border measures while deleting or misrepresenting key parts of his record.

Here are more details about the chart and how Trump used it in the campaign.

A senator gave Trump the card on his plane

U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., said he was aboard Trump’s plane in April heading from an Easter family vacation in Florida to campaign events in the Midwest. During the flight, Johnson showed Trump the graphic, which uses US Border Patrol statistics to show a dramatic increase in encounters with migrants at the southern border.

Trump asked Johnson to send it to his communications team, who changed the title and description and edited some of the notes to begin rolling it out that same day at an event with law enforcement officials in Grand Rapids, Michigan. At that event, Trump referred to people who are in the United States illegally and suspected of committing crimes as “animals.”

“It’s obvious in this chart what the Biden administration has done. “It shows what Trump struggled with and how he dealt with it successfully,” Johnson said in an interview. “And then it just shows the explosion of illegal immigration under President Biden and Vice President (Kamala) Harris.”

Border crossings reached record highs during the Biden administration but have declined since Biden issued an executive order restricting asylum applications earlier this year.

The Harris campaign accuses Trump of pressuring congressional Republicans not to support a bipartisan border security package that Democrats say would have helped fix a broken immigration system.

The graphic shows that border crossings reached record highs

The Border Patrol has recorded about 7.1 million apprehensions of people entering illegally from Mexico since the start of the Biden administration through July, but many of those apprehensions were of repeat offenders. Trump regularly criticizes Biden and Harris for allowing record-breaking numbers, often claiming without evidence that the number is above 30 million.

The graphic lists policies introduced by Trump such as “Remain in Mexico,” a program that keeps asylum seekers waiting south of the border and that Biden halted when he took office. The guidelines are intended to show that Trump crashed border crossings during his time in office.

The graphic’s description states: “Biden is seeing a world record number of illegal immigrants, many of them from prisons and mental institutions,” a claim Trump typically makes at rallies despite there being no evidence that countries are overlooking their criminals or the mentally ill send the border.

The table does not take family separation into account

The graphic incorrectly identifies the month in which Trump left office, marking it as if it had occurred in the spring of 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic led to travel restrictions and arrivals fell significantly. Before the pandemic, the Trump administration was also struggling to handle the large influx of migrants.

U.S. Rep. Robert Garcia, a California Democrat, showed the graphic at a recent congressional hearing to point out this error.

“It’s important to note and point out how wrong this actually is,” he said, noting that border encounters increased in the months that followed and during Trump’s time in office.

The graphic also ignores perhaps Trump’s most controversial immigration policy. Between 2017 and 2018, border officials separated children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border. A policy that was condemned worldwide as inhumane and that Trump himself stopped under pressure from his own party.

Trump rarely talks about family separation. Last weekend, Trump claimed he didn’t understand what Harris meant when she said he was responsible for taking the children away from their parents.

The former president has pledged to carry out the largest mass deportation possible, prioritizing migrants with criminal records. Trump said he could count on like-minded governors to support the National Guard in carrying out deportations.

Trump shows the diagram frequently

The diagram was shown on numerous screens on stage during his speech at the Republican National Convention less than a week after the Butler rally.

“The last time I put the chart up, I never really got a chance to look at it,” he said. “But without this card I wouldn’t be here today.”

Trump also took the map with him on his recent border visit to Arizona, showing it on a piece of paper as he spoke from a podium below a desert hill. Since the attack, he has used it more and more often and often tells how it saved his life.

Johnson says he’s glad to have played “a small role.”

“Either the hand of God or just a lucky coincidence is the reason he escaped assassination, quite honestly,” he said. “That’s just the historical fact now.”

He wouldn’t say whether Trump has mentioned anything about the map to him since the assassination. “These are private conversations,” he said.