A misleading TV ad from Sen. Ted Cruz claims Rep. Beto O’Rourke “said crossing the border illegally should not be a crime.” O’Rourke wasn’t referring to all illegal border crossings. He said asylum-seekers who enter the country between official entry ports should not be prosecuted.
Q: Is it true that a 1-year-old child has never appeared as a defendant in immigration court — until this year?
A: No. Unaccompanied children in the U.S. illegally, including those as young as 1, have previously appeared in court. Some children do not have attorneys.
Much of the political rhetoric in recent weeks has focused on illegal immigration. We thought it would be helpful to take a step back and look at some measures of illegal immigration in a larger context.
President Donald Trump said it’s “not true” that immigrants in the U.S. illegally are “safer than the people that live in the country,” providing several crime statistics he claimed represented the “toll of illegal immigration.” Sen. Bernie Sanders made the opposite claim, saying: “I understand that the crime rate among undocumented people is actually lower than the general population.”
This video from CNN’s Jake Tapper and FactCheck.org explains how Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen distorted the facts when she tweeted that the Trump administration does “not have a policy of separating families at the border. Period.”
Attorney General Jeff Sessions now says that the administration “never really intended” to separate families as part of its zero tolerance policy on illegal immigration. But Sessions had previously acknowledged that that’s what would happen under this policy.
During the ongoing family-separation controversy, President Donald Trump and others have made false or misleading statements on several immigration issues.
In defending its “zero tolerance” border policy that has caused the separation of families, the Trump administration has argued that the Obama and Bush administrations did this too. That’s misleading. Experts say there were some separations under previous administrations, but no blanket policy to prosecute parents and, therefore, separate them from their children.
Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen has resorted to a rhetorical sleight of hand in recent days to defend the Trump administration’s policy of separating families that illegally cross the border.
The controversy surrounding family separations at the U.S. Southern border has prompted outrage, opinions and finger-pointing. It has also raised a number of questions, including from our readers. We answer those questions here.