An online ad attacks Rep. Seth Moulton, a Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts, for not being sufficiently progressive because of past policy positions. But it also misleadingly claims that Moulton, a critic of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, “thanked ICE as they were terrorizing our communities and then killed citizens.”
Q: Is it true that ICE agents are financially rewarded for the number of people taken into custody?
A: The Department of Homeland Security has said there is no such policy, and an immigration think tank told us it is unaware of any payments per arrest. The Wall Street Journal reported that agents “are rewarded for making arrests” but didn’t say how they are rewarded. Immigration and Customs Enforcement quickly scrapped a proposed program to pay bonuses to speed up deportations.
President Donald Trump wasted no time in responding to the deaths of two U.S. citizens last month during protests against an immigration crackdown in Minneapolis. Trump and other top administration officials made inaccurate or unsupported statements within hours of the incidents, a departure from how previous presidents responded in similar situations, experts told us.
The Trump administration and some Democrats have drawn divergent conclusions from bystander video of the fatal shooting of a woman in Minnesota by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent. How can one side say the agent was “recklessly using power” and the other determine he “fired defensive shots”? Experts told us it’s common for people to view the same video differently, and that the early evidence isn’t enough to reach definitive conclusions.
Project 2025 and President Donald Trump are largely in sync on immigration. As part of our series, we examine some of the many actions that Trump has taken that were proposed in the conservative document.
In campaign appearances over the weekend in the swing state of Pennsylvania, former President Donald Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance, falsely accused Vice President Kamala Harris of letting more than 13,000 “illegal immigrant murderers” into the United States.
Every Democrat – and some Republicans – increased funding earlier this year for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency charged with deporting those living in the country illegally. The Biden administration has directed ICE to prioritize the deportation of immigrants in the country illegally who have committed serious felonies. Nonetheless, an ad from a conservative group misleadingly claims that “every Senate Democrat voted against deporting criminal illegal immigrants.”