The chart illustrates how, when President Donald Trump left office in 2020, illegal immigration skyrocketed under the Biden administration. It also has been updated monthly since 2015 and shows the "cause and effect" of the immigration catastrophe.
Senator Johnson explained that the original Flores decision of 1997 concluded with the federal government having to return any unaccompanied minor to the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) within 20 days.
He pointed out that Barack Obama "sparked the latest crisis at the border with his Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals (DACA)" which was the "main root cause of all these border crises and now this invasion."
He said that during that time, the US "had a lot more unaccompanied children come in, but we also had unaccompanied children come in with their families. Some were real families, some were make-believe families."
"But what Obama did in reaction to that, is he detained those children with their families," he explained.
However when immigration activists took the Obama administration to court and the Flores decision was "reinterpreted" to say that an unaccompanied child could not be detained with their family, Obama "started splitting up families from the unaccompanied children because he had to release the unaccompanied children."
"That was politically untenable," Senator Johnson said. "Certainly President Trump was not able to do that either."
This action, he said, was what led to the "explosion of people exploiting that Flores reinterpretation."
Watch the full episode below.
