Tag: Trump lies

The history of U.S. border apprehensions

Following President Trump’s nationally televised plea to build a border wall, we look at the modern history of the arrest of migrants attempting to enter the United States without authorization.

President Trump addressed the nation Tuesday night about what he calls, “a growing humanitarian and security crisis” at the southern border. As the government shutdown persists, here’s what we know about migration into the United States and what’s happening at the U.S.- Mexico border.

Figures released by the Department of Homeland Security show nationwide apprehensions of migrants entering the country without authorization are at some of their lowest numbers in decades. The U.S. Border Patrol states on its website that these numbers do not include individuals met at ports of entry looking to enter legally, but are determined to be inadmissible, or individuals seeking humanitarian protection under U.S. law.

U.S. Border Patrol took just over 400,000 people illegally entering the United States into custody in 2018, down from the second-high of 1.67 million in 2000.

View the complete January 10 article by Brittany Renee Mayes, Aaron Williams and Laris Karklis on The Washington Post website here.

Trump’s frustrated sales pitch on the border wall reverts to his oldest political tactic: Fear

President Trump delivers a televised address on Tuesday. Credit: Joshua Roberts, Reuters

President Trump, as he himself will tell you in a heartbeat, wasn’t supposed to win. Pundit after pundit predicted time and again that his comments would doom him, that his rhetoric was too virulent, that his tone was too aggressive. But he built a following among Republican primary voters that carried him (however bumpily) to the nomination and then, using the same rhetoric of danger and fear, leveraged partisan loyalty to squeak past Hillary Clinton by enough votes in enough places and prove everyone wrong. Trump can’t win the presidency? He just did, running the same race at the end as he had at the beginning.

There was a lesson Trump took from that, clearly: The pundits are wrong, and villainizing immigrants from Mexico and the Middle East works. He internalized the importance of holding the same core base of support that was with him early on and, however overtly, has maintained a focus on offering the same rhetoric that earned their love in the first place.

From that perspective, it’s not a surprise that Trump’s first Oval Office address to the country focused on stoking visceral fear of people crossing America’s southern border. Sure, there was, as expected, the sort of misleading data on the flow of drugs from Mexico, failing to note that (as his administration admits) the majority of those drugs and that heroin comes through existing checkpoints. Sure, he argued that the revised NAFTA agreement that hasn’t yet been ratified would somehow mean Mexico will pay for the wall, which it doesn’t. But that’s not really what he wanted Americans to focus on.

View the complete January 8 article by Philip Bump on The Washington Post website here.

Fact-checking President Trump’s Oval Office address on immigration

The president’s address to the nation on immigration was littered with falsehoods he’s said before. (Meg Kelly/The Washington Post)

The first misleading statement in President Trump’s Oval Office address Tuesday night came in the first sentence.

Trump, addressing a national television audience from behind his desk, warned of a “security crisis at the southern border” — even though the number of people caught trying to cross illegally is near 20-year lows.

Another false claim came moments later, when Trump said border agents “encounter thousands of illegal immigrants trying to enter our country” every day, though his administration puts the daily average for 2018 in the hundreds. A few sentences later, he said 90 percent of the heroin in the United States comes across the border with Mexico, ignoring the fact that most of the drugs come through legal entry points and wouldn’t be stopped by the border wall that he is demanding as the centerpiece of his showdown with Democrats.

View the complete January 9 by Salvador Rizzo on The Washington Post website here.

OUT OF TOUCH: White House Says Workers ‘Better Off’ From Trump Shutdown

Trump and his White House are extremely out of touch with the workers whose paychecks they are holding hostage.

Trump’s top economic advisor said that in some sense workers are “better off” from the Trump Shutdown because they’re basically taking vacation.

HASSETT: “Workers are furloughed, and right now, it’s about 25 percent of government workers are furloughed, which means that they are not allowed to go to work.  But then, when the shutdown ends, they go back to work and they get their back pay. A huge share of government workers were going to take vacation days, say, between Christmas and New Year’s. And then we have a shutdown, and so they can’t go to work, and so then they have the vacation, but they don’t have to use their vacation days.  And then they come back, and then they get their back pay. Then they’re — in some sense, they’re better off.”

Trump previously wrote off the workers hurt by his shutdown, suggesting that they weren’t really in pain.

VICE: “President Donald Trump has a message for federal workers who once again won’t receive their paychecks Friday: Some people have more pain than you.’” Continue reading “OUT OF TOUCH: White House Says Workers ‘Better Off’ From Trump Shutdown”

Former Trump aide: The wall was never supposed to be a literal thing

Credit: Evan Vuccil, AP Photo

Trump took a symbol of racism and made it the center of his presidency — because he liked the attention it got him at rallies.

Trump’s obsession with the border wall has now caused a government shutdown, but it was originally introduced to him by aides as a way to keep his campaign speeches under control.

During the 2016 campaign, Trump’s advisors struggled to figure out how to get Trump, who hates to prepare for things, to focus on the issue of immigration during campaign speeches.

“How do we get him to continue to talk about immigration?” Sam Nunberg, one of Mr. Trump’s early political advisers, recalled asking Roger J. Stone Jr., another adviser, according to the New York Times. “We’re going to get him to talk about how he’s going to build a wall.”

View the complete January 7 article by Dan Desai Martin on the ShareBlue.com website here.

President Trump’s nonsensical claim that Mexico is paying for the wall

More than 200 times Trump promised Mexico would pay for the wall. Now he falsely says he’s keeping his promise with the revised trade agreement with Mexico. (Meg Kelly/The Washington Post)

“I would build a great wall, and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me, and I’ll build them very inexpensively, I will build a great, great wall on our southern border. And I will have Mexico pay for that wall.”

— Donald Trump, in his presidential announcement speech, June 16, 2015

“What we save on the USMCA — the new trade deal we have with Mexico and Canada — what we save on that, just with Mexico, will pay for the wall many times over just in a period of a year, two years and three years. … So I view that as, absolutely, Mexico is paying for the wall.”

— Trump, remarks during a news conference, Jan. 4, 2019

Just about every president has made a campaign promise that, once elected, he discovers he cannot fulfill. Continue reading “President Trump’s nonsensical claim that Mexico is paying for the wall”

Who’s Going To Pay For The Wall? Mexic — Oh??

Trump shut down the government to force taxpayers to fund an ineffective border wall that he promised Mexico would pay for. As Americans increasingly put the blame on Trump for the shutdown, his lies about paying for the border wall are unraveling.

Trump shut down the government to force taxpayers to fund his border wall after promising over 200 times that Mexico would pay for it.

Washington Post: “From his announcement speech to the election, he declared 212 times that Mexico would pay for the wall, according to the comprehensive record of Trump’s speeches, interviews and tweets maintained by factba.se. That works out to almost every two days during the campaign. Mexico refuses to pay for the wall, and Trump has engineered a government shutdown to try to force Congress to appropriate the necessary funds.”

Trump falsely claimed that he never said “Mexico would write a check” for the border wall, when he wrote a campaign memo promising to force Mexico to make a $5-10 billion “one-time payment.”

Trump: “When, during the campaign, I would say Mexico is going to pay for it, obviously I never said this and I never meant they are going to write out a check.” Continue reading “Who’s Going To Pay For The Wall? Mexic — Oh??”

The Trump administration’s misleading spin on immigration, crime and terrorism

“In the last two years, ICE officers arrested 235,000 criminals who were able to come in over the years through the United States.”

— President Trump, in remarks at the White House, Jan. 2

“This group has apprehended, last year, 17,000 criminals trying to get across the border. Seventeen thousand. And that’s one category. There are plenty of others.”

— Trump, in a White House briefing with border officials, Jan. 3

“3,755 Known or suspected terrorists prevented from traveling to or entering the U.S. by DHS (FY17)”

— Border security briefing from the Department of Homeland Security, Jan. 4

View the complete January 7 article by Salvador Rizzo on The Washington Post website here.

Trump administration flocks to Fox to recycle discredited statistic about terrorists crossing the southern border

The Trump administration drew media criticism in February for a misleading claim that 10 terrorists were intercepted crossing the U.S.-Mexico border each day in 2017. The claim has now resurfaced as “almost 4,000 terrorists” throughout 2018. It is still misleading.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders appeared on the January 4 edition of Fox News’ Fox & Friends to defend President Donald Trump’s stance on the ongoing government shutdown. She told the hosts that a border wall is needed because “last year alone, there were nearly 4,000 known or suspected terrorists” arrested along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Continue reading “Trump administration flocks to Fox to recycle discredited statistic about terrorists crossing the southern border”

Trump adds $2 trillion to national debt he promised to ‘get rid of’

Credit: Evan Vuccil, AP Photo

Unfortunately, Trump is running the government like one of his many failed businesses.

When he was running for office, Trump promised he could “get rid of” America’s $19 trillion national debt “fairly quickly.” In fact, he boasted he could wipe it all out “over a period of eight years.”

In yet another failure, Trump has added $2 trillion to the debt during his first two years, according to new figures released by the Treasury Department. CNN reports that the recent spike in the national deficit is “particularly unusual in such a strong economy without major new expenditures.”

President Obama left a recovering economy in the hands of Trump and deficit enthusiast Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI). As CNN notes, the first year of Trump’s term “debt began to level off.”

View the complete January 4 article by Dan Desai Martin on the ShareBlue.com website here.