Benny Johnson’s Border Claims: Real Data, False Conclusions

The Post

On September 26, 2026 at 9:25 AM ET (13:25 UTC), conservative commentator Benny Johnson posted on X to his millions of followers alongside a chart of monthly southwestern border encounters compiled from U.S. Customs and Border Protection data. The text of the post, in full:

“This chart is the only reason you need to vote Republican in the midterms. The second Democrats regain control, they will open the border and continue the replacement of the U.S. population with foreigners who hate our way of life.

If they retake power, we will lose our country.”

Johnson hosts The Benny Show podcast and has built a large following across social media.^[8] As of September 28, 2026, he had about 4.2 million followers on X and 6.1 million subscribers on YouTube, more than 10 million combined.^[13][14] The post bundles three distinct claims that need to be evaluated separately: whether the chart data is accurate, whether Democrats would “open the border,” and whether there is any basis for the “replacement” framing.

Claim 1: Does the Chart Data Hold Up?

Mostly True

The underlying CBP statistics are real and publicly available. According to DHS, U.S. Border Patrol apprehensions at the southwest border averaged 155,485 a month during the Biden administration.^[3] Since February 2025, the first full month of Trump’s second term, Border Patrol apprehensions there have stayed below 10,000 in every month but one (May 2026, at 10,011).^[15] Pew Research Center called these the lowest totals in more than 25 years of available monthly data.^[4] Counting people stopped at ports of entry as well, total CBP encounters at the southwest border have run between about 7,800 and 13,500 a month over the same period.^[15]

In fiscal year 2025, Border Patrol recorded 237,538 encounters at the southwest border, the lowest in any fiscal year since 1970.^[4] Including ports of entry, total CBP encounters there were about 443,700.^[15] The chart data, in other words, is not fabricated.

What the chart omits

The data chart is accurate, but the accompanying claim that it “proves” the cause is partly overstated, for three reasons.

First, Biden himself imposed stricter enforcement measures in the final phase of his presidency — including a June 2024 presidential proclamation restricting asylum at the border (Proclamation 10773, tightened in September 2024), which contributed to a decline before Trump took office.^[16][4] Border Patrol apprehensions fell from 117,905 in May 2024 to 47,320 in December 2024. The drop did not begin on January 20, 2025.^[15]

Second, encounter rates are shaped by conditions on the Mexican side of the border as well. Increased Mexican enforcement played a documented role in reducing crossings during both the late Biden and Trump periods.^[17][4] Attributing the full decline to U.S. party control alone overstates domestic policy’s effect.

Third, and most critically, a chart of past outcomes cannot “prove” what any administration will do in the future. It can document what happened. It cannot predict future policy by a diverse, multi-faction political party.

The data merits a Mostly True rating: the encounter statistics Johnson references are accurate, and the contrast between the Biden-era peak and the current Trump-era low is real. But the framing that this chart proves a specific causal and predictive claim about Democratic intent overstates what the data actually shows.

Claim 2: Will Democrats “Open the Border”?

Misleading

No mainstream Democratic leader has proposed “open borders” as a policy position. The phrase is a political strawman: it describes a position almost no one actually holds in order to make Democratic immigration policy sound more radical than it is.

Critics point to two things. In a paid 2013 speech released in 2016, Hillary Clinton described her “dream” of “a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders,” which she later said referred to energy.^[18] In 2019, most Democratic presidential candidates on the debate stage backed making unauthorized border crossing a civil rather than a criminal offense.^[19] Neither is a proposal to remove border controls, and neither is a position of the party’s current leadership.

In August 2025, the New Democrat Coalition, the largest ideological caucus among House Democrats, released a comprehensive immigration and border security framework. It calls for funding at least 22,000 Border Patrol agents and at least 500 more CBP officers at ports of entry, resources for removing people convicted of violent crimes, and more staff to process asylum claims, alongside temporary legal status for long-term undocumented residents who pay a fine and pass a background check.^[5] This framework is not a description of open borders; it is an attempt to move the Democratic caucus toward stronger enforcement language.

The label has nonetheless stuck. A Harvard CAPS/Harris poll of 2,745 registered voters, conducted April 23 to 26, 2026, found that 58% believe Democrats “stand for open borders.”^[20][9] That gap between the policy record and public perception is the ground the post stands on.

The substantive underlying concern is real: Biden-era policies did coincide with record-high encounters, and meaningful policy differences exist between the parties on enforcement discretion, asylum processing, and deportation priorities. But “open the border” is not a description of any formal Democratic platform position. Stating it as a certainty (“they will open the border”) presents a prediction as a proven fact and attributes to an entire party a position its mainstream representatives explicitly reject. That is the definition of a Misleading rating.

Claim 3: The “Replacement” Theory

False

The phrase “replacement of the U.S. population with foreigners who hate our way of life” is a formulation of the Great Replacement theory — an ethno-nationalist conspiracy theory that claims Western governments are deliberately facilitating mass immigration to replace native-born (implicitly white) populations with non-white immigrants for political advantage.

Where this theory comes from

The modern version was coined by French author Renaud Camus in his 2011 book Le Grand Remplacement, which claimed that native white Europeans are being replaced by non-white, largely Muslim, immigrants,^[6] with political elites colluding in the process.^[28] The theory was quickly adopted by white nationalist movements globally, merged with older “white genocide” rhetoric, and migrated into U.S. political discourse in the late 2010s.

It has inspired mass violence. The gunman who killed 51 people at two Christchurch mosques in 2019 titled his manifesto “The Great Replacement,” and the gunman who killed 23 people at an El Paso Walmart months later referred to the theory in his.^[6] The gunman who killed 10 people at a Buffalo supermarket in 2022 left a document tied to the same theory.^[21] The gunman who killed 11 people at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018 left no manifesto, but before the attack had posted on Gab blaming Jews for bringing non-white immigrants and refugees into the country, an antisemitic version of the same idea.^[6]

Its adoption in mainstream political media

In the years since, the replacement framing migrated from fringe forums into mainstream conservative media. A 2022 New York Times study of five years of Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show found 400 instances in which he talked about Democratic politicians and others seeking to force demographic change through immigration.^[22] In 2021, Rep. Elise Stefanik ran Facebook ads claiming that a Democratic amnesty plan “will overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington,” ads critics said echoed the theory.^[23] During his 2022 Ohio Senate campaign, JD Vance told Fox News that Democrats “have decided that they can’t win reelection in 2022 unless they bring a large number of new voters to replace the voters that are already here.” Five experts on hate speech who reviewed that and similar comments told the Associated Press they promote the theory.^[22] Vance rejected the comparison, saying in a debate that “you can believe in a border without being a racist.”^[24]

Johnson’s formulation follows that pattern, adding the specificity that the incoming immigrants “hate our way of life” — a characterization with no factual basis.

What the evidence actually shows

No credible evidence supports the claim that any mainstream American political party has a policy goal of replacing the native-born population for ethnic or political reasons. Immigration policy is debated as a matter of economics, labor force growth, humanitarian obligation, and enforcement capacity. None of these debates involves a plan to demographically replace existing Americans.

The characterization of immigrants as people who “hate our way of life” is similarly unsupported. On one economic measure, immigrants participate at higher rates than native-born Americans. Kauffman Foundation data for 2021 show that in an average month, about 580 of every 100,000 immigrant adults became new entrepreneurs, compared with about 320 of every 100,000 native-born adults, a rate about 80 percent higher.^[11]

An Associated Press-NORC poll conducted in December 2021 and released in May 2022 found that 32% of U.S. adults agreed that a group of people is trying to replace native-born Americans with immigrants who agree with their political views.^[25][10] On a stricter measure, agreeing with both of the poll’s replacement-theory questions, 17% of all adults qualified, compared with 45% of people who preferred OANN or Newsmax.^[25] The prevalence of this belief reflects how effectively the theory has been amplified; it does not reflect whether the underlying claim is true.

This claim rates False. There is no factual basis for the assertion, it originates in white nationalist ideology, and it has been directly linked to mass violence.

What the post implies

That the border numbers alone are reason to vote Republican, and that a Democratic House would cost Americans their country. That is a voting appeal built on the claims rated above, not a proposition the chart or any source can settle, so it carries no separate rating. What it rests on is rated: the chart data holds up, the “open the border” prediction is Misleading, and the replacement claim is False.

The Legitimate Underlying Concern

What the finding changes

The chart is a real argument about enforcement, and it can be made without either false claim. Whether a Democratic House would loosen current enforcement is a fair question the chart bears on. Whether Democrats plan to replace the population is not, and nothing in the chart speaks to it.

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