Fact check: Trump begins final full day of campaign with repeat lies about immigration and jobs
By Daniel Dale, CNN
Washington (CNN) — Former President Donald Trump began the final full day of the 2024 presidential campaign as he has spent many of the days prior: lying about immigration, the economy and other subjects.
At the first campaign rally of his planned four-rally day, in Raleigh, North Carolina, Trump repeated numerous immigration-related lies he has told over and over during the last month. He also revived a baseless conspiracy theory about the Bureau of Labor Statistics, adding in some new imaginary details for good measure, and made two separate false claims about former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Here is a fact check of some of Trump’s Raleigh remarks:
Immigration
The federal response to Hurricane Helene: Trump repeated his false claim that the Federal Emergency Management Agency is “still not there” in North Carolina responding to Hurricane Helene, which hit in late September.
This is not even close to true; FEMA immediately responded to the disaster in North Carolina and said October 25 that it had more than 1,700 staff deployed in the state. FEMA said October 16 that it had approved more than $100 million in individual aid to North Carolina residents.
At a briefing in early October, North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, said, “We’re grateful for the quick actions and close communications that we have had with the president and with the FEMA team.” Will Ray, the state’s emergency management director, said at the briefing: “We’re grateful for the support not just from the 22 states that have sent teams to support us but also from our FEMA team and other members of the federal family.”
FEMA and migrants: Trump falsely claimed that FEMA didn’t respond in North Carolina because the agency “spent all their money on bringing in murderers and a lot of people; they spent all their money on bringing in illegal migrants.”
FEMA did not spend its disaster relief money on undocumented people. Congress appropriated the agency more than $35 billion in disaster relief funds for fiscal 2024, according to official FEMA statistics, and also gave FEMA a much smaller pool of money, $650 million in fiscal 2024, for a program aimed at helping communities shelter migrants. Contrary to Trump’s claims, these are two separate pots of funds.
The number of migrants: Trump repeated his false claim that “21 million people” crossed the border under the Biden administration. Through September, the country had recorded under 11 million nationwide “encounters” with migrants during the Biden administration, including millions who were rapidly expelled from the country. Even adding in so-called gotaways who evaded detection, estimated by House Republicans as being roughly 2 million, there’s no way the total is “21 million.”
Migrants and homicide: Trump repeated a false claim about figures released in September about immigrants and crime, wrongly saying that the numbers showed 13,099 murderers crossed the border during the Biden administration.
In reality, the Department of Homeland Security and independent experts have noted that this figure for immigrants who now have homicide convictions is about people who entered the country over decades, including during Trump’s own administration, not just under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris — and that the figure includes people who are currently incarcerated in federal, state and local prisons and jails. You can read more here.
Prisons and foreign leaders: Trump repeated his false claim that foreign governments are “releasing all of their prisoners from jails all over the world — not South America, all over the world.” He then suggested the global prison population is down as a result.
There is no evidence for these claims, which Trump’s own campaign has been unable to defend. The recorded global prison population increased from October 2021 to April 2024, from at least about 10.77 million people to at least about 10.99 million people, according to the World Prison Population List compiled by experts in the United Kingdom.
“I do a daily news search to see what’s going on in prisons around the world and have seen absolutely no evidence that any country is emptying its prisons and sending them all to the US,” Helen Fair, co-author of the prison population list and research fellow at the Institute for Crime & Justice Policy Research at Birkbeck, University of London, said in June, when Trump made a similar claim.
Trump’s favorite chart: Trump repeated his long-debunked false claim that his favorite chart about migration numbers at the southern border — which he had fortunately turned his head to look at when a gunman tried to kill him at a campaign rally in July — has an arrow at the bottom pointing to “the day I left office,” when, he said, the US had “the lowest illegal immigration” in its history.
The chart doesn’t show that. In fact, the arrow actually points to April 2020, when Trump still had more than eight months left in his term and when global migration had slowed to a trickle because of the Covid-19 pandemic. After hitting a roughly three-year low (not an all-time low) in April 2020, migration numbers at the southern border increased each month through the end of Trump’s term.
Wall construction: Trump repeated his false claim that he had “571 miles of wall” built on the southern border during his administration. That’s a significant exaggeration; official government data shows 458 miles were built under Trump — including both wall built where no barriers had existed before and wall built to replace previous barriers.
Migrants in Springfield: Trump repeated his false claim that “they dropped 30,000 illegal migrants” on Springfield, Ohio, saying that while others use “a little technicality” to say these new arrivals from Haiti are not illegal migrants, they are “illegal” in his view.
This is false in more than one way. While we don’t know the immigration status of every Haitian immigrant in Springfield, the community is, on the whole, in the country lawfully. The Springfield city website says, “YES, Haitian immigrants are here legally, under the Immigration Parole Program. Once here, immigrants are then eligible to apply for Temporary Protected Status (TPS).” Republican Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine wrote in a New York Times op-ed about Springfield in September that the Haitian immigrants “are there legally” and that, as a supporter of Trump and JD Vance, he is “saddened” by the candidates’ disparagement of “the legal migrants living in Springfield.”
Second, nobody “dropped” the immigrants into Springfield; the city’s Haitian residents were not sent there by a government resettlement program. Rather, they independently decided to move to the city because of employment opportunities, affordable housing and the presence of a Haitian community, among other factors.
And while there is no official tally of the number of immigrants in Springfield, Trump’s “30,000” figure exceeds local estimates. The website for the city of Springfield says there are an estimated 12,000 to 15,000 immigrants in the county that includes Springfield, where the total population is about 138,000. Chris Cook, the county’s health commissioner, said in July that his team estimated the best number was 10,000 to 12,000 Haitian residents in the county.
Jobs
The jobs revision in August: Trump repeated his false claim that a “whistleblower” was responsible for a downward revision to jobs numbers by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, which announced in August that its annual revision of labor data found that the economy added about 818,000 fewer jobs than initially reported for the 12 months ending in March.
“They thought they’d be able to get away with it through the election, but there was a whistleblower, and the whistleblower couldn’t stand what they were doing, and blew the whistle on them, and they got caught,” Trump said in Raleigh.
This is fiction. The Bureau of Labor Statistics regularly releases the preliminary revised data in August, and it had disclosed the precise date of this particular data release — August 21 — weeks in advance.
William Beach, a conservative economist who was appointed by Trump to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics, wrote on social media: “For those who think the big revision to the BLS jobs numbers ‘leaked’ and was meant to come out after the election, remember that BLS always announces its draft revisions in August and announced this year’s date, August 21, many months ago. It is important to check your facts.”
The latest jobs revision: Trump falsely claimed that there was another downward revision of jobs numbers, last week, “because they had another whistleblower, so they had to do it — they wanted to wait until after the election again.” This is nonsense, too; this was another normal revision conducted and announced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics itself, and there is no sign any whistleblower was involved.
The October jobs report: Trump spoke of the October jobs report, which showed a below-expectations gain of 12,000 jobs amid major storms and labor strikes, and said he was grateful it was released — “because they tried to hold it; they tried not to put the report out. Kamala said, ‘Don’t put that report, it’ll cost me the election.’”
This is imaginary, too. The report came out at its publicly scheduled time Friday. There is no indication that Harris or anyone else tried to prevent its release.
Nancy Pelosi
Pelosi and stock: Trump repeated a false claim about Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker, saying that she sold Visa stock “last week” and then “the following day” the federal government announced a “major investigation” of Visa.
Visa stock was actually sold by Pelosi’s husband — more than two and a half months before the Justice Department filed a lawsuit against the company. And the lawsuit was filed in September, not last week.
Pelosi and Trump’s State of the Union address: Trump revived a false claim from his presidency, saying that Pelosi “could have gone to jail” for ripping up a copy of his 2020 State of the Union address after he completed it, because she was “not allowed to do that.”
It was not illegal under government records laws for Pelosi to rip a copy of Trump’s address. Pelosi’s copy of the speech did not qualify as an official government record, experts have told media outlets.
Miscellaneous
Trump and Nord Stream 2: Trump repeated a false claim about the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, which was a prized initiative of Russian President Vladimir Putin, saying, “I closed up his pipeline, it was dead.” Trump did not kill the pipeline. He signed sanctions related to the project into law about three years into his presidency, when the pipeline was already about 90% complete, and the state-owned Russian company behind the project announced in December 2020 that construction was resuming.
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