On the second day of their 2024 convention, Republicans put a spotlight on immigration and crime, often relying on dubious or misleading statistics. Here are 12 claims that caught our attention. As is our practice, we do not award Pinocchios for a roundup of statements made during convention events.
“They’ve emboldened drug cartels to flood our streets with fentanyl, killing over 100,000 Americans every year.”
— Eric Hovde, Wisconsin GOP candidate for Senate
This claim lacks context. Under President Biden, according to Customs and Border Protection statistics, overall drug seizures have dropped, especially for marijuana, but until this year increased substantially for fentanyl — the drug most responsible for overdose deaths. Both the decrease in marijuana seizures and the increase in fentanyl seizures reflect trends that started under President Donald Trump.
Most drugs come into the United States across the southern border with Mexico. But a wall does not limit this illegal trade, as much of it travels through legal borders or in tunnels unaffected by visible physical barriers. Even if a wall could curb drug trafficking, it would have a minimal impact on the death toll from drug abuse. As president, Trump often touted how much seizures of drugs at the southern border had increased on his watch. This is an imperfect metric. It could mean that law enforcement is doing a better job. But more seizures also might indicate that the drug flow has increased, and that law enforcement is missing even more.
The amount of fentanyl seized at the border increased under both Biden and Trump, though so far the amount jumped by a larger percentage under Trump, CBP statistics show. In Trump’s four fiscal years, the number of pounds increased 586 percent, compared with 462 percent in the first three fiscal years under Biden.
The amount of fentanyl seized by border officials increased from almost 4,800 pounds seized in fiscal 2020 to roughly 27,000 pounds in fiscal 2023. There were about 700 pounds of fentanyl seized in fiscal 2016, the last full fiscal cycle before Trump took office.
Annual overdoses deaths began to exceed 100,000 on a 12-month basis in June 2021, though the numbers have begun to drop in the past year.
“He [Sen. Jon Tester] even put a liberal judge on the Supreme Court who can’t even define what a woman is.”
— Tim Sheehy, Montana GOP candidate for Senate
Sheehy slammed Tester, the incumbent, for voting to confirm Ketanji Brown Jackson. He’s referring to a question posed to Jackson during her Supreme Court confirmation hearings by Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.). It has become lore among Republicans. Here’s the full context for the exchange.
Blackburn asked: “Can you provide a definition for the word ‘woman’?”
Jackson replied: “Can I provide a definition? No, I can’t.”
Blackburn: “You can’t?”
Jackson: “Not in this context. I’m not a biologist.”
Blackburn: “You mean the meaning of the word ‘woman’ is so unclear and controversial that you can’t give me a definition?”
Jackson: “Senator, in my work as a judge, what I do is I address disputes. If there’s a dispute about a definition, people make arguments and I look at the law and I decide.”
“Under Trump, we had a booming economy. We weren’t at war.”
— Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.)
The U.S. economy was in a free fall at the end of Trump’s term because of the pandemic, and experts will long argue whether Trump’s initially lackadaisical response to the crisis made the economic turmoil worse. Trump inherited an economy that was in the middle of one of the longest post-World War II economic expansions on record, and before the pandemic there were signs the economy was about to hit a rough spot. U.S. manufacturing was in a mild recession for all of 2019, the year before the pandemic began.
But the United States was not at war?
At least 65 active-duty troops were killed in hostile action during Trump’s presidency, the records show, as Trump ramped up commitments in Iraq and Syria to fight the Islamic State terrorist group while also launching airstrikes on Syria as punishment for a chemical weapons attack. Trump also escalated hostilities with Iran, including the killing of Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani. Trump said at the time the strike was carried out in accordance with the Authorization for Use of Military Force resolution of 2001. Trump tried to wind down the war in Afghanistan, cutting a deal with the Taliban to set a deadline for U.S. troops to leave, but troops were still there when he was president.
“When Minneapolis was in flames and businesses were in ruins, Kamala Harris encouraged and enabled the criminals and the rioters. Oh, it gets worse. She even promoted a fund to release the criminals from jail. It doesn’t get reported much in our media, but one criminal Kamala Harris freed in Minneapolis went on to murder a man in St. Paul, Minnesota.”
— Rep. Tom Emmer (R-Minn.)
Emmer is making a huge leap here to claim that a tweet led to murder.
Until the killing of George Floyd in police custody, the Minnesota Freedom Fund (MFF) was a relatively small vehicle for assisting people who needed cash for bail. Just weeks after Floyd’s death, it raised an astonishing $35 million, in part because of a tweet by Harris, who at the time was a senator for California lending her name to a fundraising effort. That influx put a strain on an organization that at the time had only one full-time staff member. The MFF is among the many organizations that seek to mitigate what some see as inequities in the nation’s cash-bail system. People who cannot afford to pay the full amount in cash generally must either wait in jail until their trial or borrow money, forfeiting 10 percent of the loan upfront. Some states have moved to eliminate cash bail.
It turned out that few people involved in the protests needed the MFF’s help to get out of jail. According to an accounting by the American Bail Coalition, verified by The Fact Checker with a review of Hennepin County jail records, all but three of the 170 people arrested during the protests between May 26 and June 2, 2020, were released from jail within a week. Of the 167 released, only 10 had to put up a monetary bond to be released; in most cases, the amounts were nominal, such as $78 or $100. In fact, 92 percent of those arrested had to pay no bail — and 29 percent of those arrested did not face charges.
But there have been some instances of the MFF assisting people accused of serious crimes after they were released, including murder, attempted murder and third-degree assault. The man accused of murder had been jailed originally on an indecent-exposure charge, which called for bail of $2,000.
“11.5 million people have crossed our border illegally under Joe Biden.”
— Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.)
Cruz appears to have produced this figure by combining “encounters” at the southern border with “gotaways” — which occur when cameras or sensors detect migrants crossing the border but no one is found or no agents are available to respond.
Customs and Border Protection recorded about 10 million “encounters” between February 2021, after President Biden took office, through June. But that does not mean all those people entered the country illegally. Some people were “encountered” numerous times as they tried to enter the country — and others (more than 4 million of the total) were expelled, mostly because of covid-related rules that have since ended.
CBP has released more than 3.2 million migrants into the United States at the southern border under the Biden administration through April, the Department of Homeland Security said. The number of gotaways and migrants arriving during Biden’s presidency appears to be around 5 million.
“It [illegal immigration] happened because Democrats cynically decided they wanted votes from illegals more than they wanted to protect our children.”
— Cruz
There is no evidence for this hyperbolic claim. Federal law bans noncitizens from voting in federal elections, including races for president, vice president, Senate or House of Representatives. Under a law adopted in 1996, noncitizens who vote can face a fine or a prison term as long as a year, or both — not to mention deportation.
Until the 1920s, when there was a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment, 22 states and federal territories allowed noncitizens to vote in state elections. Now only a few jurisdictions allow some form of noncitizen voting. Some states, such as Ohio and Louisiana, in recent years have enacted constitutional bans on noncitizen voting.
A majority of states — 36 — request or require voters to show some sort of identification when they vote, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Increasingly, states also are seeking ways to require proof of citizenship to vote or are considering ways to update voter lists to eliminate any noncitizens.
There is only scattered evidence of noncitizens voting in federal elections — sometime by mistake (such as erroneously thinking they were eligible while getting a driver’s license) but also with nefarious intent.
“[Under Trump], we achieved the lowest rate of illegal immigration in 45 years.”
— Cruz
Annual apprehensions at the border increased during the Trump administration. Cruz appears to be referring to the numbers in April 2020, when apprehensions plunged because of lockdowns at the start of the pandemic.
“Never forget the Democratic Party is the party of defunding the police. They said it. They mean it, and they can’t wiggle out of it.”
— Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird
When Biden ran for president in 2020, he firmly opposed the concept of eliminating police departments. We have previously given the Trump campaign Four Pinocchios for asserting the opposite in its television ads.
“No, I don‘t support defunding the police,” Biden said in a CBS News interview. “I support conditioning federal aid to police based on whether or not they meet certain basic standards of decency and honorableness and, in fact, are able to demonstrate they can protect the community and everybody in the community.”
Biden came under scrutiny from the left for his position and for proposing to spend an additional $300 million a year on the community policing program started in the Clinton administration. His budgets have proposed increased money for local law enforcement, and this year he signed the Recruit and Retain Act, which expanded the community policing funding.
“We can’t survive the dramatic increases in violence, crime and drugs that the Democrats’ policies have brought upon our communities.”
— House Speaker Mike Johnson (La.)
Violent crime rates, especially for homicide in large cities, have fallen sharply during Biden’s presidency, after a surge during the pandemic. The violent crime rate is believed to be near its lowest level in 50 years.
Many other speakers, such as Cruz, used anecdotal evidence to make an emotional case against undocumented immigrants and blame them for crime. There is little evidence that immigrants — even undocumented immigrants — cause more crime.
“And let me remind you, Kamala had one job. One job. And that was to fix the border.”
— Nikki Haley, former U.N. ambassador
Several Republicans sought to tie the vice president to the migrant surge — another speaker called her the “border czar” — but her appointment was much narrower. She was not in charge of immigration issues and she certainly wasn’t a czar.
In 2021, Biden assigned Harris to take charge of the “root causes” strategy — essentially a diplomatic effort with El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras to stem migration from those countries. The efforts appeared to have some impact — border arrests from those countries dropped from 700,000 in the 2021 fiscal year to fewer than 500,000 in 2023. But the problem shifted. Migrants surged from countries such as Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba and Haiti — countries that were not part of the “root causes” strategy.
“The largest tax cuts in American history.”
— Lara Trump
In citing a list of Trump achievements, Lara Trump cited an old false chestnut of her father-in-law’s. Trump’s tax cut amounted to nearly 0.9 percent of the gross domestic product, meaning it was far smaller than President Ronald Reagan’s tax cut in 1981, which was 2.89 percent of GDP. Trump’s tax cut is the eighth-largest tax cut in the past century — and even smaller than two tax cuts passed under President Barack Obama. Trump’s tax cut was heavily tilted toward the wealthy and corporations.
“Our energy independence.”
— Lara Trump
Donald Trump often made this claim as president — “we’re energy independent, we don’t need foreign nations anymore” — basing the statement on the fact that the United States exported more crude and refined products than it imported. (The United States still relied on other countries for its energy needs.) But his daughter-in-law is wrong to suggest that the situation has changed under Biden. In 2023, the United States imported about 8.51 million barrels per day of petroleum and exported about 10.15 million barrels per day, according to the Energy Information Administration, making the United States still a net exporter.
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