Fresh off a stinging defeat in a standoff over funding for a 2,000-mile wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, Donald Trump on Sunday released shocking statistics to prove that his proposed barrier is critical to the nation’s economic security.

Nobody has any idea where those numbers came from.

Trump claimed in a tweet that there are close to 26 million illegal immigrants living in the U.S., casting doubt on the more commonly cited figure of 11 million.

Trump tweeted, “We are not even into February and the cost of illegal immigration so far this year is $18,959,495,168. Cost Friday was $603,331,392. There are at least 25,772,342 illegal aliens, not the 11,000,000 that have been reported for years, in our Country. So ridiculous! DHS”

We are not even into February and the cost of illegal immigration so far this year is $18,959,495,168. Cost Friday was $603,331,392. There are at least 25,772,342 illegal aliens, not the 11,000,000 that have been reported for years, in our Country. So ridiculous! DHS

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 27, 2019

The numbers—so specific that they are rounded to the nearest single digit—appear to be credited to the Department of Homeland Security, but the department’s most recent publicly available estimates of the undocumented immigrant population in the United States is less than half the president’s purported minimum.

In other words, Trump just added 14 million undocumented immigrants to the U.S. population. He lied.

Asked about the tweet on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney defended the president’s broader point about the need for increased border security.

“I’m not exactly sure where the president got that number this morning, but I think what you see him trying to do is point out how silly this debate is,” Mulvaney said. “This is not that much money in the greater scheme of things.

“I think he was trying to draw attention to the fact that while the Democrats are sitting here dug in… that we’re spending so much money on other things,” he added. “It’s really quite absurd.”

Twitter quickly called out Trump’s lie:

So incredibly sick of this lying jackass in the White House and his absurd made up "statistics." https://t.co/kVid9cSHoO

— Charles Johnson (@Green_Footballs) January 27, 2019

$18,959,495,168

He's got it down the dollar.

25,772,342

And down to the last individual.

Right?

And where did this information come from? How would you even compile such data with such precision? No, don't look away, answer the question: HOW?

Show your work. https://t.co/mb9RUtPEjF

— Stonekettle (@Stonekettle) January 27, 2019

These are just random numbers he made it. Wut? https://t.co/IQ3qTePBuK

— Pesach 'Pace' Lattin (@pacelattin) January 27, 2019

This man literally went on his phone and pressed a bunch of random numbers…
If you dont know an exsct number of illegal alliens just put 25 million+ and make an estimation based on that ????. In conclusion 47,75oeow,749373,893e https://t.co/3zfIKADYAX

— Joshua Brantley (@BrantleyJoshua) January 27, 2019

According to DHS, there are 12 million illegal immigrants, less than half of what Trump claims. As 2020 nears, he will escalate the repetition and scale of such lies to assist voter suppression. If we allow it, this is how elections become meaningless and democracies crumble. https://t.co/bfpfNu0hv1

— Evan McMullin (@Evan_McMullin) January 27, 2019

According to a December 2018 release from Homeland Security’s Office of Immigration Statistics, an estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants were living in the United States in January 2015, the most recent year for available data. More recent estimates from the Pew Research Center put the estimate at a slightly lower 10.7 million people in 2016, its lowest number in more than a decade.

In the past, the president has personally estimated that the “real” number of undocumented immigrants in the country may be as high as 30 million people—meaning that one in every ten U.S. residents is here illegally. The source of those numbers has never been identified.