Go Nakamura/Reuters
Former President Donald Trump visits the US-Mexico border at Eagle Pass, Texas, as seen from Piedras Negras, Mexico, on February 29.
Washington
CNN
—
President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump delivered back-to-back Thursday speeches at different Texas locations near the border with Mexico.
Biden’s speech, largely delivered from a prepared text, was highly factual. Biden devoted much of the address to an accurate description of various provisions of the bipartisan border bill he supports but Trump’s opposition helped to kill in Congress.
Trump’s speech minutes prior, much of which appeared to be off the cuff, was filled with assertions about migrants that were unsubstantiated, misleading or plain false.
Some of his words were too conspiratorially vague to definitively fact-check. For example, Trump spoke of migrants as “entire columns of fighting-age men” and said “they look like warriors to me; something’s going on, and it’s bad” – winking at a baseless narrative about foreign adversaries using migration to surreptitiously assemble some sort of enemy force in the US. He said he thinks unnamed people are allowing migrants into the country because “they’re looking for votes,” faintly echoing his previous false claim about migrants being signed up to vote in the 2024 election – and declining to explain that non-citizens cannot vote in federal, state and almost all local elections (though some migrants might potentially receive citizenship years down the road).
Trump also spoke of the US being “overrun” by a “new form” of crime he called “Biden migrant crime.” He made that claim though early data suggests that in 2023 the US was at or around its lowest violent crime rate in more than 50 years amid a sharp decline in homicides; though there were cases of undocumented people committing crimes during his own presidency; and though, despite some recent cases in which undocumented people are accused of serious offenses, research has found no connection between immigration and crime – and sometimes that immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than people born in the US.
Here’s a fact check of two of Trump’s other claims.
An evidence-free story about foreign countries and ‘insane asylums’
Trump repeated – and broadened – his familiar story about how migrants are supposedly arriving in the US after having been deliberately freed by foreign leaders from prisons and mental health facilities.
After claiming that “they’re coming from jails and they’re coming from prisons and they’re coming from mental institutions and they’re coming from insane asylums,” Trump added, “You know, I know many of the leaders of these other countries that are doing it.” He said moments later, “You look at the jails now – you look at the jails throughout the region but more importantly throughout the world, they’re emptying out, because they’re dumping them into the United States.”
Facts First: There is no evidence for Trump’s claim that jails “throughout the world” are being emptied out so that prisoners can travel to the US as migrants, nor for his claim that foreign leaders are also emptying out mental health facilities for this purpose….
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