Democratic Rep. Keith Ellison tweeted that the Supreme Court “ratified Donald Trump’s ‘total and complete shutdown’ of Muslims entry into the United States.” That is a Trump quote from the presidential campaign. But his actual executive actions didn’t go that far.
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.”
Q: Did Rhode Island pass a bill “to keep Trump off the 2020 ballot”?
A: No. Only one chamber passed a bill to require presidential candidates to disclose their federal tax returns.
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.
Q: Has Stormy Daniels announced she’s running for president?
A: No. That false headline is based on a question she asked in jest.
During the ongoing family-separation controversy, President Donald Trump and others have made false or misleading statements on several immigration issues.
Q: Did President Donald Trump call for the creation of a “space force” to fight off an “alien attack”?
A: No. The president did request exploration of a “space force,” but it is unrelated to extraterrestrial activity.
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.