Fact-Checking Tuesday's Republican Convention Claims On Immigration

After Donald Trump triumphantly entered the hall on the second night of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, the program turned to one of his signature issues: illegal immigration. An ominous video of chaos at the U.S.-Mexico border led to to a speech by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), who declared, “We are facing an invasion on our southern border.” Here’s an Associated Press look at some of the claims made Tuesday: A video narrator says that President Biden "made one of the worst mistakes of any president in history when he told illegals to come here and surge our border.” But the clips was taken from a 2019 Democratic presidential debate. In fact, Biden enacted restrictions on migrants seeking asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border, and border arrests fall more than 40% after Biden's halt to asylum processing.

Another video asserted that “Biden’s incompetence has led to a horrific 300,000 Americans now dead, not from a nuclear bomb but from lethal fentanyl brought in through Biden’s wide-open border.” AP says that it' correct that much fentanyl is smuggled from Mexico, but 86.4% of fentanyl trafficking crimes were committed by U.S. citizens in the year ending in September 2023. The fentanyl scourge began well before Biden took office. Cruz charged that, "Every day Americans are dying — murdered, assaulted, raped by illegal immigrants that the Democrats have released.” It's true that some heinous and high-profile crimes involving people in the U.S. illegally have been in the news, but there is nothing to support the claim that it happens every day. Immigrants in the U.S. both legally and illegally number 46.2 million, or almost 14% of the U.S. total. Hardly a month passes without at least one person being charged with a high-profile, horrific crime. There is no evidence of a spike in crime perpetrated by migrants, either along the U.S.-Mexico border or in cities seeing the greatest influx of migrants, like New York. Studies say people living in the U.S. illegally are less likely than native-born Americans to have been arrested for violent, drug and property crimes.