Fact check: Trump, repeating the same lies, makes at least 18 false claims in Mar-a-Lago remarks

By Daniel Dale, CNN

Washington (CNN) — Rinse and repeat.

As Election Day approaches, former President Donald Trump keeps telling the same lies at event after event – many about immigration, but many others about a variety of additional topics.

Here is a fact check of 18 false claims in his Tuesday remarks at his Mar-a-Lago club and residence in Florida. This is not intended as a comprehensive list of his false claims at the event.

Harris’ border role: Trump falsely claimed that President Joe Biden appointed Vice President Kamala Harris “as the border czar,” adding that, regardless of the term, “she was responsible for the borders, totally responsible.” Biden never made Harris “border czar,” a label the White House has always emphasized is inaccurate, and never put her in charge of border security, a responsibility of Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas. In reality, Biden gave Harris a more limited immigration-related assignment in 2021, asking her to lead diplomacy with El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras in an attempt to address the conditions that prompted their citizens to try to migrate to the United States.

The people on the ICE non-detained list: Trump, referring to a list of immigrants with homicide convictions, repeated his false claim that Harris “let the more than 13,000 convicted illegal aliens – nobody would have let these people into our country.” In reality, the Department of Homeland Security and independent experts have noted that this figure is about people who entered the country over decades, including during Trump’s own administration, not just under Biden and Harris – and the figure includes people who are currently incarcerated in federal, state and local prisons and jails. You can read more here.

Migrants in Springfield, Ohio: Trump falsely claimed of Springfield, Ohio:  “They dropped 32,000 illegal aliens. They tried to give them legal terminology, but – it’s not. Illegal aliens, 32,000 into a 50,000 person town, beautiful town, no problems, and now they don’t know what to do.”

This is false in more than one way. While we don’t know the immigration status of each and 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 Trump-Vance supporter, 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 “32,000” figure greatly 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.

A gang and Aurora, Colorado: Trump falsely claimed that a gang from Venezuela has “literally taken over the town” in Aurora, Colorado, adding “they’ve taken over large sections of the town.”

The gang has members in Aurora and has caused problems in some apartment buildings, but it has not come close to taking over the city. Republican Aurora Mayor Mike Coffman said in a September joint statement, issued with the conservative chair of the city council’s public safety committee, that the gang “has not ‘taken over’ the city” and that problems with the gang “experienced at a select few properties do not apply to the city as a whole or large portions of it.” Coffman noted that the city’s police department had linked 10 people to the gang and arrested eight.

The number of migrants: Trump repeated his false claim that Harris “left 21 million aliens pour across our country,” meaning “let” rather than “left.”  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.”

Foreign countries and jails: Trump repeated his false claim that foreign leaders around the world have emptied their jails to allow their criminals to migrate to the United States.

“I said, ‘I know what they’re going to do. They’re going to open up their jails and just dump them into the United States.’ And that’s what happened.” He said he was talking not just about countries near the US but “all over South America, all over the Middle East, all over Asia, all over Europe, all over Africa.”

There is no evidence for this claim. 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.

Venezuela and jails: Trump repeated his baseless story about Venezuela in particular “emptying their jails into our country,” adding, “They’ve taken all their criminals, most of them – the rest are coming, they’re all coming – they’ve taken their drug dealers, and they’ve put them into the United States of America. Thank you very much, Kamala, appreciate it.”

There is no basis for the claim that Venezuela has somehow deliberately “put” criminals into the United States, and Trump has never corroborated the claim that it is emptying its prisons for migration purposes; experts have told CNN, PolitiFact and FactCheck.org that they know of no evidence for it.

“We have no evidence that the Venezuelan government is emptying its prisons or mental health institutions to send them outside the country, in other words, to the U.S. or any other country,” Roberto Briceño-León, founder and director of the Venezuelan Observatory of Violence, an independent organization that tracks violence in the country, said in an email to CNN in June, after Trump made similar claims.

Harris and “missing” or “dead” children: Trump falsely claimed that, under Biden and Harris, “325,000 children are missing, dead, sex slaves or slaves – 325,000 children who came in through the open border are now missing. Many of them are dead.”

Trump was grossly distorting federal statistics.

He appeared to be referring to an August report from the Homeland Security Department’s Office of Inspector General, which said ICE reported more than 32,000 unaccompanied migrant children failed to appear as scheduled for immigration court hearings after being released or transferred out of custody between fiscal years 2019 and 2023 – a period that, notably, includes two years and four months under the Trump administration. The report also said that 291,000 unaccompanied migrant children during this period were not given notices to appear in court.

The report said that ICE has “no assurances” these children “are safe from trafficking, exploitation, or forced labor.” But it did not definitively assert that any of them were being exploited – let alone that many are dead, a claim experts say is nonsense.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, told CNN in a message this summer: “Long story short, no, there are not 320,000 kids missing. 32,000 kids missed court. That doesn’t mean they’re missing, it means they missed court (either because their sponsor didn’t bring them or they are teenagers who didn’t want to show up). The remaining 291,000 cases mentioned by the OIG are cases where ICE hasn’t filed the paperwork to start their immigration court cases.”

FEMA and North Carolina: Trump repeated his false claim that the federal government has not responded to Hurricane Helene in North Carolina, saying, “They haven’t shown up. They’re not in North Carolina. The people of North Carolina have suffered incredibly and there’s just nobody to help them. “

This is not even close to true; the Federal Emergency Management Agency immediately responded to the disaster in North Carolina and said Friday that it had more than 1,700 staff deployed in the state. FEMA said on 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.” State emergency management director Will Ray 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, still criticizing the hurricane response, said of FEMA: “They said that the money was spent on bringing illegal migrants into our country – they spent close to a billion dollars.”

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.

Trump and the Nord Stream 2 pipeline: Trump repeated his false claim that he “ended” Russia’s Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Germany. He did not end the project. In reality, he signed sanctions related to the pipeline 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.

Veterans Choice: Trump revived one of the lies he told most frequently as president, falsely claiming he got the Veterans Choice program approved after others had “been trying to do this for 48 years.” The Veterans Choice program was actually signed into law in 2014 by his predecessor, President Barack Obama. Trump signed a law in 2018, the VA MISSION Act, that expanded and modified the program established under Obama.

Who pays tariffs: Trump repeated his frequent false claim that, through tariffs, “China paid us hundreds of billions of dollars.” US importers make the tariff payments, not China, and study after study has found that Americans bore the overwhelming majority of the cost of Trump’s tariffs on China.

Previous presidents and tariffs on China: Trump repeated his frequent false claim that no previous president had imposed tariffs on Chinese imports, saying, “No other president’s gotten 10 cents from China.” The US was actually generating billions per year in revenue from tariffs on Chinese imports before Trump took office; in fact, the US has had tariffs on Chinese imports since 1789. Trump’s predecessor, Obama, imposed additional tariffs on Chinese goods.

Inflation: Trump blamed Harris for causing “the worst inflation in our lifetime, maybe the worst inflation we’ve ever had, because I don’t think they’re – I mean, I know for a fact they’re not adding all of the numbers; if they did, I think it’s the worst inflation probably in our – the lifetime of the country.”

Aside from the claim about Harris’ role, it’s not true the US has had its worst inflation ever during the Biden administration or that the Bureau of Labor Statistics isn’t “adding all of the numbers”; Trump could fairly say that the US inflation rate hit a 40-year high in June 2022, when it was 9.1%, but that was not close to the all-time record of 23.7%, set in 1920. (And the rate has since plummeted. The most recent available inflation rate at the time Trump spoke here was 2.4% in September.)

The European Union and products: Trump made a subjective claim that the “European Union is taking advantage of us,” then repeated his false claim that “they don’t take our product.” While the European Union certainly has some trade barriers that make it harder for US companies to export products there, it’s a massive exaggeration to categorically declare “they don’t take our product.” The US exported more than $639 billion worth of total goods and services to the European Union in 2023.

The trade deficit with the European Union: Trump repeated another false claim about the European Union: “We have a deficit with them of over $300 billion, think of that.” The US goods and services trade deficit with the European Union was about $125 billion in 2023. Even counting goods trade alone and excluding services, the 2023 deficit was about $201 billion.

The formation of the European Union: Trump revived a false claim from his presidency, asserting that the European Union was created to take advantage of the US: “I mean, look, they united in order to take advantage of the United States. That’s why they united. That’s why they formed their coalition. And that was done to take advantage of the United States.”

Experts on the EU told CNN during Trump’s presidency that there is no basis for such claims, noting that US presidents had consistently supported European integration efforts. “The President’s claims are preposterous,” Desmond Dinan, a public policy professor at George Mason University who is an expert in the history of European integration, said during Trump’s presidency. “The European Communities (forerunner of the EU) were formed in the 1950s as part of a joint US-Western European plan to stabilize and secure Western Europe and promote prosperity, by means of trade liberalization and economic growth, throughout the shared transatlantic space.”

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