FACT FOCUS: A look at ominous claims around illegal immigration made at the Republican convention
After Donald Trump entered the hall triumphantly on the second evening of the Republican National Convention In Milwaukee, the program focused on one of its signature issues: illegal immigration. An ominous video of chaos at the U.S.-Mexico border prompted a speech by U.S. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who declared, “We are facing an invasion on our southern border.”
Here are some of the claims made on Tuesday:
VIDEO NARRATOR: “Biden made one of the biggest mistakes of any president in history when he told illegal immigrants to come here and flood our border.”
THE FACTS: After the claim, the video cuts to President Joe Biden saying, “I would in fact make sure that there is — we rush to the border immediately,” and the narrator says, “And they did.”
But important context is missing. The clip is from September 12, 2019, Democratic presidential debate. A moderator, Univision’s Jorge Ramos, discusses immigration issues, noting that Biden was vice president in the administration of President Barack Obama, who deported 3 million people. He then asks if Biden “is willing to say tonight that you and President Obama made a mistake?”
Biden responds by citing Obama’s immigration record and discussing then-President Trump’s policies. He then adds, “What I would do as president is a couple of other things, because things have changed. I would basically make sure that there’s — we go to the border immediately. All those people who are seeking asylum deserve to be heard. That’s who we are.”
Since then, Biden has repeatedly talked about sending agents and other law enforcement agencies to the border to address the flow of migrants.
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VIDEO NARRATOR: “Biden’s incompetence has led to a horrific 300,000 American deaths, not from a nuclear bomb, but from deadly fentanyl shipped in through Biden’s wide-open border.”
THE FACTS: While it’s true that a large portion of U.S. fentanyl is smuggled from Mexico, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission, 86.4% of fentanyl trafficking crimes were committed by U.S. citizens in the 12-month period ending in September 2023.
The fentanyl scourge began long before Biden took office. Border seizures, which tell only part of the story, have increased sharply under Biden, in part due to improved detection. About 27,000 pounds (12,247 kilograms) of fentanyl were seized by U.S. authorities in the 2023 fiscal year, compared with 2,545 pounds (1,154 kilograms) in 2019, when Trump was president.
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CRUZ: “Americans are dying every day — murdered, beaten, raped by illegal immigrants that the Democrats set free.”
THE FACTS: A number of gruesome and high-profile crimes involving people in the U.S. illegally have made headlines in recent months. But there’s nothing to support the claim that they happen every day.
The foreign-born populationImmigrants in the country, both legal and illegal, were estimated at 46.2 million, or nearly 14% of the U.S. total, in 2022, according to the Census Bureau, including about 11 million in the country who are in the country illegally. Barely a month goes by without at least one person in the country illegally being charged with a high-profile, heinous crime, such as the February murder of a 22 year old nursing student from Georgia or the strangling death of June a 12 year old girl from Houston.
Texas is the only state that tracks crime based on immigration status. A study published by the National Academy of Sciences, based on data from the Texas Department of Public Safety from 2012 to 2016, found that people living in the U.S. illegally “had substantially lower crime rates than U.S.-born citizens and legal immigrants across a range of offenses.”
While the FBI statistics do not differentiate between crimes based on the immigration status of the attacker, there is no evidence of an increase in migrant crime, either along the U.S.-Mexico border or in cities with the largest influx of migrants, such as New York. Research has shown that people living in the U.S. illegally are less likely than native-born Americans to be arrested for violent, drug, or property crimes.
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Find AP fact checks on https://apnews.com/APFactCheck.