FACT FOCUS: A look at false claims made by Trump in California

During a press conference at his golf club in the Los Angeles area, former president donald trump various topics revisited Tuesday evening debatewhere he repeated several false and misleading statements on topics including crime, the economy and immigration.

Here are the facts:

CLAIM: New numbers show crime has skyrocketed under the Biden administration.

THE FACTS: Violent crime surged during the pandemic, with homicides up nearly 30% in 2020 over the previous year. It’s the largest one-year increase since the FBI began keeping data.

But FBI data released in June showed that the overall violent crime rate fell 15% in the first three months of 2024 compared to the same period last year. One expert, however, cautioned that these figures are preliminary and may overstate the true decline in crime.

On Friday, Trump cited figures he cited from the “bureau of justice statistics” to claim that crime had increased. This appears to be a reference to the National Crime Victimization Survey recently released by the Justice Department, which found that the number of times people were victims of violent crime increased by about 40% from 2020 to 2023. The report notes, however, that while the violent crime rate was higher in 2023 than it was in 2020 and 2021, it was not statistically different from the rate in 2019, when Trump was president.

The survey is designed to capture both crimes reported to the police and crimes not reported to the police, and is conducted annually through interviews with approximately 150,000 households. It does not include homicides or crimes against people under the age of 12.

CLAIM: Thousands of people are being murdered in the US by “illegal immigrants”

THE FACTS: The evidence doesn’t support this. FBI statistics don’t differentiate between crimes based on the immigration status of the attacker, and there’s no evidence of a spike in crimes committed by migrants, either along the U.S.-Mexico border or in cities with the largest influx of migrants, like New York. In fact, national statistics show that violent crime is on the decline.

CLAIM: Prices have risen “like no one has ever seen before.”

THE FACTS: That’s not true. Inflation rose in 2021-22, although it rose much more sharply in 1980 when inflation reached 14%. In June 2022, inflation peaked at 9.1%.

Economists blame much of the inflation spike on the pandemic’s disruptions to global supply chains, which cut supplies of semiconductors, autos and other goods. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine also sent gas and food prices higher. And Biden’s stimulus checks and other spending helped boost post-pandemic spending.

Inflation has now fallen to 2.5%, not far from the Federal Reserve’s 2% target. Prices are still about 19% higher than they were before the pandemic, but the Census Bureau reported Tuesday that household incomes rose by a similar amount, putting inflation-adjusted incomes about where they were in 2019.

CLAIM: The voting system is not fair. Millions and millions of ballots are being “sent all over the place. Some people get two, three, four, five.”

THE FACTS: Election officials have procedures in place to ensure that only one mail-in ballot is issued to each eligible voter. When a voter requests a mail-in ballot, election officials will verify that person’s eligibility by checking the voter’s registration information. They will look to see if the voter’s information matches what’s on file, and in some cases, they will also check to see if the voter’s signature matches.

When a ballot is sent out by an election office, that ballot is assigned to that specific voter. If someone else tries to use that ballot, the voter’s information will not match the office’s records for that ballot and it will be rejected. Election officials continually update their voter rolls to ensure accuracy, removing those who are deceased, have moved out of state, or are ineligible.

In some cases, ballots are canceled — when a voter makes a mistake and requests a new ballot or decides to vote in person instead of using a mail ballot. In those cases, the original ballot is marked in such a way that if that original ballot were to show up at the election office, it would be marked and rejected.

At one point in his remarks, Trump mentioned California, where all voters receive a mail-in ballot. He suggested that he would win if the votes were counted fairly. He has made this claim before, and it is an exaggeration. Only 23% of California voters are registered Republicans, while 46% are registered Democrats. He lost California to Hillary Clinton in 2016 by 4.2 million votes, and he lost the state to Biden in 2020 by 5.1 million votes.

CLAIM: A whistleblower forced the government to implement the recent downward revision of the number of jobs by 818,000.

THE FACTS: That is incorrect. The preliminary revision occurred as part of a normal annual process and was released on a previously announced date. Each year, the Department of Labor releases a revision of the number of jobs added during the 12-month period from April through March of the previous year.

The adjustment is being made because the initial government job counts were based on business surveys. The revision is then based on actual job counts from unemployment insurance files that are compiled later. The revision is compiled by career government employees with little involvement from political appointees.

CLAIM: Harris and the Biden administration are secretly flying in hundreds of thousands of ‘illegal immigrants’.

THE FACTS: Migrants are not being secretly flown to the U.S. by the government. Under a Biden policy in effect since January 2023, up to 30,000 people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela can enter the country each month if they apply online with a financial sponsor and arrive at a designated airport, paying for their own travel. Biden was exercising his “parole” power, which under a 1952 law allows him to admit people “only on a case-by-case basis for compelling humanitarian reasons or substantial public interest.”

___ Associated Press writers Alanna Durkin Richer, Chris Rugaber, Christina Almeida Cassidy and Elliot Spagat contributed to this story.

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AP fact checks here: https://apnews.com/APFactCheck.