This is False.

Pence has used this 90 percent drop statistic many times, but has never explained where it comes from.

When the COVID-19 pandemic started, immigration drastically dropped worldwide as governments enacted policies limiting people’s movement. In the U.S., Trump instituted Title 42, a public health policy that authorized the Border Patrol to immediately return most immigrants back to Mexico. The increased use of this policy decreased the use of other programs, including "Remain in Mexico."

U.S. Customs and Border Protection during the pandemic also adopted a new way of reporting migrant encounters. Before the pandemic, it only reported enforcement actions under immigration law; its data during the pandemic includes actions taken under both immigration law and the public health policy. Therefore, 2020 data isn’t entirely comparable to pre-pandemic numbers.

Accounting for challenges in data comparisons, our review found an increase of 300 percent in illegal immigration from Trump’s first full month in office, February 2017, to his last full month, December 2020.

One way to get close to Pence’s alleged 90 percent decrease in illegal immigration is by comparing data from May 2019, the month during the administration that had the highest apprehensions, to April 2020, the month with the lowest enforcement actions in calendar year 2020.

But that’s a severely cherry-picked time period.
-Analysis by Aaron Sharockman, PolitiFact

For reference, Nathaniel, after last month's debate, 44 percent of Republican debate watchers felt that the moderators did an excellent or very good job. 39 percent said the moderators did about average, and 14 percent said they did poor or terrible.

—Analysis by Holly Fuong of 538

When debate moderators asked the 2024 GOP candidates about the impending government shutdown, some – including Trump’s closest opponent DeSantis – pivoted to blame the former president and current President Biden for the logjam.

Both men also called out Trump for his absence on stage, noting that he should be answering for himself as the shutdown looms.

"People in Washington are shutting down the American dream with their reckless behavior,” DeSantis said.

“And you know who else is missing an action? Donald Trump is missing an action. He should be on this stage tonight. He owes it to you to defend his record where they added 7.8 trillion to the debt that set the stage for the inflation that we have.”

Chris Christie – one of Trump’s staunchest critics – also admonished the former president.

“If the government shuts down, should voters blame populace Republicans? Very simply everybody who's in Washington, D.C.,” said Christie.

“And let's be honest about this with the voters. You know, during the Trump administration, they added $7 trillion — $7 trillion in national debt. And now the Biden administration has put another 5 trillion on and counting.”

“Donald Trump– he hides behind the walls of his golf clubs, and won't show up here to answer questions like all the rest of us are up here. He puts 7 trillion on the debt. He should be in this room to answer those questions for the people you talk about who are suffering,” Christie said.

–ABC News’ Isabella Murray

Scott, one of many candidates jockeying with Ramaswamy for third place nationally, pointedly asks Ramaswamy about his business dealings in China. This follows the first debate when both Pence and Christie attacked Ramaswamy too. It doesn’t seem like the other candidates like him very much …

—Analysis from Nathaniel Rakich of 538

At PolitiFact, this is our fifth presidential cycle. We’ve published more than 23,000 fact-checks since launching in 2007, all using our Truth-O-Meter, which rates claims on a scale from “True” to “Pants on Fire” false.

If PolitiFact is new to you, there are a couple of rules of the road. First, we don’t fact-check every claim every candidate says. We couldn’t … we’d be dead. We focus on claims that are particularly interesting, in the news or obviously potentially wrong. Our grading scale tries to measure both the literal truth and how voters might interpret a politicians’ words. So if Pence tonight claims that he and Trump “achieved energy independence” in their first three years of office, it can be more complicated to fact-check than you think.

In Pence’s case, yes, the United States did produce more energy than its citizens consumed during the Trump-Pence administration, but that was built on more than a decade of improvements in shale oil and gas production, as well as renewables. And the U.S. did not produce more gasoline than it consumes (which is maybe what you were thinking about). And if that’s not enough, even though the U.S. didn’t use all the energy it produced, it still imported a substantial amount of energy to serve domestic markets.

So far in this cycle, we’ve published more than 50 fact-checks of the GOP candidates. Our checks tend to follow the polling of the race. We'll be drawing on those previous fact-checks, as well as the thousands of other claims we've vetted, throughout the night.
—Aaron Sharockman, PolitiFact