Campaign Context: DeSantis says record numbers of Chinese nationals crossing border

In this Campaign Context video, we're examining comments made by Florida Governor and GOP presidential candidate Ron Desantis while he was campaigning at the Texas border in June.

As campaign season nears, politicians are turning up the volume on campaign rhetoric. To cut through the noise we're launching Campaign Context, a weekly series providing clarity on the messages you're hearing from candidates on the campaign trail. We're digging past the politics and into the facts to provide you with the transparent, spin-free information you need to make informed decisions this election season.

AUSTIN (KXAN) — In this Campaign Context video, we're examining comments made by Florida Governor and GOP presidential candidate Ron Desantis while he was campaigning at the Texas border in June.

Desantis was discussing migrants crossing our southern border from countries you might not expect when he said, "I think they've identified 10,000 Chinese nationals coming across the southern border."

We traced that figure back to Republican Congressman Mark Green of Tennessee, who is also chair of the House Homeland Security Committee. We reached out to Green's office and learned that he gathered those numbers from this data dashboard on the U.S. Customs and Border Protection website.

When we pulled up the data for Chinese citizens entering the southwest border, it did show more than 10,000 single adults from China have entered the border so far this fiscal year, and that is a sizeable increase compared to 2022.

At the same time, the same data shows the total number of Chinese migrants detected at the border is less than 1% of all migrant encounters this fiscal year.