Fact-checking Trump’s biggest claims on immigration: How do they measure up?
WASHINGTON — Migrants, according to former President Trump, are violent criminals, voting illegally, eating your pets, draining emergency disaster funding and stealing your job.
These claims have elicited fear, hatred and anger among many voters.
We looked into the facts around some of his most frequent statements about immigration and the border, some of which he has repeated hundreds of times.
Former President Trump says that if reelected, he will initiate the largest mass deportation of undocumented immigrants in history. Experts say that’s unlikely.
Migration levels when Trump left office
Trump’s claim: “The day I left office, the border was the safest it ever was in the history of our country,” Trump said this month at a Fox News town hall. “We had the fewest number of people.”
Fact check: Trump often uses a chart that he says demonstrates that border crossings were at an all-time low when he left office. He was pointing to such a chart during a July campaign rally when a gunman tried to kill him.
The arrow on the chart actually points to April 2020, eight months before he left office. That month marked a three-year low in crossings. Global migration at the time had dwindled because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
After that, border arrests began to increase through the end of Trump’s term, Border Patrol figures show.
Border wall
Trump’s claim: that he built “571 miles of wall” on the southern border.
Fact check: After he took office, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection built 458 miles of new wall, agency figures from January 2021 show. Just 85 of those miles were in locations where no barriers previously existed. The other 373 miles replaced dilapidated or outdated barriers.
How many migrants entered U.S. under Biden
Trump’s claim: “Twenty-one million people came in over the last three years with them,” he said. “We’re not going to have a country left. There’s no country that can sustain this.”
Fact check: It’s likely far less. Border agents recorded roughly 10.5 million “encounters” with migrants nationwide since President Biden took office, a number that includes millions of rapid expulsions and multiple attempts by the same person to cross. Others were placed in deportation proceedings and have since been removed from the country.
House Republicans estimate roughly 2 million migrants evaded detection altogether, but that’s not nearly enough to total 21 million, as Trump claims.
They’re violent criminals and murderers
Trump’s claim: Last month on Truth Social, Trump claimed that “13,000 convicted murderers” entered the U.S. under Biden.
They “roam free to KILL AGAIN,” he wrote the next day.
Fact check: The statistics Trump cited are not about people who entered specifically during the Biden administration. They refer to immigrants who entered under any administration, including Trump’s.
In the wake of the attempted assassination, Trump’s campaign messaging continued undeterred, casting immigrants as the source of violence in the United States.
In a letter to Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas), Patrick Lechleitner, acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said there were 13,099 people with homicide convictions on the agency’s “non-detained docket” as of July 21.
That docket is a list of people, with and without criminal convictions, who are not currently held in immigration detention. Some have been listed for decades because their country of citizenship won’t let the U.S. deport them back. Many are still serving jail or prison sentences for their crimes.
Trump has also broadly painted migrants as violent criminals. Researchers have found that undocumented immigrants commit crimes at substantially lower rates than native-born citizens.
Migrants steal American jobs
Trump’s claim: “They’re going to be attacking — and they already are — Black population jobs, the Hispanic population jobs, and they’re attacking union jobs too,” Trump said during a recent campaign rally in Pennsylvania. “So when you see the border, it’s not just the crime. Your jobs are being taken away too.”
Fact check: Data on U.S. employment and the economy overwhelmingly suggest a different reality, as The Times’ Don Lee reported. Migrants fill otherwise vacant jobs, help to keep job creation strong and provide an influx of millions of tax dollars.
Economists say immigrants without legal status most often take on labor intensive positions that native-born workers are unwilling to fill, such as in the agricultural sector. Two in three farmworkers are immigrants, according to the USDA, and 41% hold no work authorization.
In California, the population of U.S. citizens ages 16 and older fell by 625,000 from 2021 to 2023, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, while employment rose by 725,000. Employment rates for native- and foreign-born residents fell by similar levels, indicating that immigrants aren’t taking jobs from Americans.
They’re terrorists
Trump claim: “You have large numbers of terrorists coming in like we’ve never seen,” Trump told Asheville, N.C.’s ABC 13 News in August. “We have thousands of terrorists coming into our country.”
Fact check: Government data suggest the numbers are considerably smaller, and that domestic terrorism, such as that inspired by white supremacy, poses a far greater terrorism threat today than foreign-born extremists.
DHS data show that arrests of people on the terrorist watchlist have declined since January after increasing each year with overall migration trends since fiscal year 2021. As of July, 139 people on the watchlist were stopped at the U.S.-Mexico border and 283 at the U.S.-Canada border. The watchlist includes people directly engaged in or supporting terrorist activities, as well as people associated with them, such as family members.
An analysis by the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute showed 230 foreign-born terrorists planned, attempted or carried out attacks on U.S. soil from 1975 through 2023, resulting in 3,046 murders. Nine entered the U.S. illegally, 13 were asylum seekers, 29 were refugees, 79 were permanent residents and the others were on some type of visa or from countries that aren’t required to get one. The status of 15 terrorists couldn’t be determined.
“During that period, the chance of being murdered by a foreign-born terrorist on U.S. soil was 1 in 4,449,257 a year,” the analysis states.
Voting illegally
Trump claim: In January, Trump told an Iowa crowd that Democrats are allowing migrants into the country “to sign these people up to vote. They can’t speak a word of English for the most part, but they’re signing them up.”
Fact check: Illegal voting by migrants is a claim Trump and other Republicans have made in previous election cycles. Experts say such claims are unsupported and give fuel to extremist ideologies, such as the so-called great replacement theory, a racist conspiracy that there’s a plot to reduce the population of white people.
Republicans are betting that raising illegitimate fears about noncitizen voting will resonate with voters frustrated by illegal immigration.
By law, only U.S. citizens are eligible to vote for president and other top federal offices, and anyone else who attempts to will face fines, imprisonment and possible deportation.
Data indicate that voting by noncitizens is rare. For example, a study of the 2016 election by the Brennan Center for Justice found that officials referred about 30 cases of suspected noncitizen voting for investigation or prosecution.
DHS has lost track of 320,000 children
Trump claim: In New York on Sunday, Trump said, “325,000 children are missing, dead, sex slaves, or slaves. They came through the open border and they’re gone.”
Fact check: This appears to be based on an August report by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General that stated more than 32,000 unaccompanied migrant children failed to appear for their immigration court hearings from fiscal years 2019 to 2023.
On top of that, Trump appears to be inappropriately adding 291,000 children who, according to the report, had not been served notices to appear in immigration court as of May 2024.
The report said children “who do not appear for court are considered at higher risk for trafficking, exploitation, or forced labor.”
But the report did not state that any children were, as Trump claimed, missing, dead, sex slaves, or slaves.
Experts said the report also missed crucial context about why some children failed to appear, including that some had pending applications for relief, distrust of federal agencies and outdated mailing addresses. In addition, the data cover more than a year of Trump’s presidency.
Eating pets in Springfield
Trump claim: During his debate last month against Vice President Kamala Harris, the former president claimed that in Springfield, Ohio, immigrants are “eating the dogs. … They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”
Fact check: That comment came after his running mate, JD Vance, stoked lies on X that Haitian migrants are stealing and eating pets in Springfield. In an interview with CNN, Vance defended amplifying the rumors, saying he was willing to “create stories” to get his message across.
Even if the topic was his 2020 election loss or the Jan. 6 insurrection, Trump brought up immigration in his debate against Harris.
Ohio leaders including Republican Gov. Mike DeWine said they received no credible reports substantiating the rumors. The city became inundated with hoax bomb threats that forced lockdowns, evacuations and closures at schools, government buildings and hospitals.
FEMA ran out of money after helping migrants
Trump claim: In the wake of Hurricane Helene, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas said the Federal Emergency Management Agency is meeting immediate needs but doesn’t have the funds to make it through the rest of the hurricane season. Trump and his supporters seized on the statement, claiming FEMA has given so much money to cities dealing with an influx of migrants that it has none left for natural disasters.
“It’s all gone,” Trump said during a visit to a hard-hit community in North Carolina. “They’ve spent it on illegal migrants.”
Fact check: In fiscal year 2024, Congress appropriated $650 million to a program that helps state and local governments provide temporary shelter and other services to migrants who are released from federal custody near the border. The funding comes from the budget of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, but is administered by FEMA.
FEMA’s disaster relief funding is significantly higher — Congress appropriated $36 billion in fiscal year 2024, according to the agency’s budget.
FEMA’s money also isn’t “all gone.” Agency officials said they can meet immediate needs but, after back-to-back hurricanes in a year of tornadoes, wildfires and flooding, they might need to ask Congress for more funding sooner than expected.
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