USA TODAY International Edition
Fact check: More bogus claims by Trump
President, supporters mislead on immigration
During the ongoing family-separation controversy, President Donald Trump and others have made false or misleading statements on several immigration issues:
Trump falsely claimed that the U.S. has “thousands of judges – border judges – thousands and thousands.” Here’s more on that and other statements from Trump and his backers that don’t reflect reality:
Border judges and hearings
In adopting a “zero tolerance” policy for those crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally, Trump is choosing to detain and criminally prosecute border crossers, rather than releasing them pending an immigration hearing – as the Obama administration did and his own administration had been doing.
Trump explained his opposition to a “catch and release” policy in recent remarks to a small business group, saying that “when we release the people, they never come back to the judge.”
He told the National Federation of Independent Businesses that only “like 3 percent” of people released pending their hearings show up in court.
Some Republican senators – led by Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina – have proposed legislation to increase the number of immigration judges in an attempt to alleviate the backlog and expedite the immigration hearings. But Trump has rejected that idea, too. “We don’t want judges,” he told the business group June 19. “We don’t want people coming in. We want them to come in through a legal process like everybody else that’s waiting to come into our country.”
Trump gets two things wrong, but we will start with the easy one: The U.S. does not have “thousands and thousands” of “border judges.”
The U.S. has “approximately 350 immigration judges,” according to the Department of Justice.
Graham’s bill, which has seven Republican co-sponsors, would authorize an additional 225 judges and “prioritize resolving the cases of children and families in family residential centers.”
Trump’s other claim – “when we release the people, they never come back to the judge” – is also false. Trump said only “like 3 percent” show up for court, but we could find no evidence that the percentage is that low. Neither the White House nor the Department of Justice responded to our request for the supporting data.
The Justice Department’s FY2016 Statistics Yearbook reports that 25 percent of immigration cases were decided “in absentia.” The report does not differentiate between those captured at the border for illegal crossing and those arrested in the interior of the country for other offenses.
Smuggling problem, in context
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen claimed that in the past five months, there had been a “314 percent increase” in adults trafficking children to the border, “fraudulently claiming to be a family unit.” That sounds like a big increase, but not when such cases are placed in context.
The raw numbers behind the increase are 46 suspected fraudulent cases in fiscal year 2017 and 191 suspected cases for the first five months of fiscal year 2018 – that’s October 2017 through February 2018. That’s a 315 percent increase, not accounting for the different time period.
Those figures are a tiny fraction of the total number of family apprehensions at the border. There were 75,622 family unit apprehensions in fiscal year 2017 at the Southwest border, so the 46 suspected cases of fraud were just 0.06 percent of all such apprehensions.
For the first five months of fiscal year 2018, there were 31,102 family unit apprehensions. The 191 suspected fraud cases would be 0.61 percent of that.
Trump has described the situation as “a massive child smuggling trade.” He claimed in a speech to a business group June 19 that child smuggling is “the worst it’s ever been.”
We don’t know if it’s “the worst it’s ever been” because we don’t have statistics for previous years. DHS has not provided any numbers on suspected child smuggling or fraud cases beyond the current and previous fiscal year.
DACA distortion
Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin blamed the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program for hundreds of thousands of families and unaccompanied minors coming from Central America to the U.S. illegally since 2012.
Johnson’s office told us that he was relying on Homeland Security figures for apprehensions of unaccompanied minors and families who came from the “Northern Triangle” of Central America.
The data provided – which we couldn’t find online – show that from July 2012, when DACA went into effect, to May 2018, there were 303,722 apprehensions of family units and 207,187 apprehensions of so-called unaccompanied alien children from that region.
Family units include at least two people, Johnson’s office said, so that’s how he figures there were at least “half a million family members.”
But none of those children would be eligible for DACA. The program was open to those who could prove they had been living in the U.S. continuously since June 15, 2007.
Johnson’s office told us the senator recognizes DACA doesn’t apply to those who came to the U.S. after the program started, but he believes “coyotes” used that information to convince people to pay them to be smuggled into the U.S.
It’s possible that some who later came to the U.S. had been misinformed about the DACA program, but several government reports cited other reasons for the surge, primarily violence in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.
“We don’t want judges . ... We don’t want people coming in.”
President Donald Trump