Ira Mehlman, of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, tells AFN the organization watched in amazement at the now-famous moment when Trump pointed to a chart of U.S. Border Patrol statistics at a campaign stop in Butler, Pennsylvania.
FAIR says the chart was created by Sen. Ron Johnson, a Republican from Wisconsin. It shows the explosion in documented “encounters” along the southern border, the term when a Border Patrol agent finds someone who is in the country illegally.
"Everybody expects that this is going to be a big issue in the campaign, and it should be,” Mehlman says. “It is consistently if not the top issue among the top two issues on the minds of voters.”
On the stage, Trump had turned his head slightly to call attention to the massive chart (click on chart for larger image) when an assassin’s bullet struck him in the right ear. The bullet would have likely struck Trump in the head if he had not turned.
The former president has jokingly said the Border Patrol “saved my life,” referring to the chart.
According to Mehlman, the American public now knows about that famous chart and the data.
“The data on that chart demonstrates that we've seen over the past 3 1/2 years at the border,” he says. “It is absolutely unprecedented.”
