Category: Fact Checking

President Donald Trump has said over the last year that money brought in from his increased tariffs would pay for at least half a dozen initiatives — from reducing the national debt to providing dividend checks to “moderate income patriots” — but the revenue raised so far can’t deliver all of them.

In fact, that revenue would be able to cover only a fraction of what the president has proposed. Trump recently highlighted three initiatives that he claimed would be “easily” paid for because of the tariff revenue: an increase in the defense budget, dividend checks for Americans and paying down the debt. It would take several years for the estimated revenue from Trump’s tariffs to cover the cost of those first two proposals, if the tariff rates remain in effect.

“Tariffs fall very short of funding all the priorities the President has suggested they can pay for,” Erica York, vice president of federal tax policy at the Tax Foundation, told us.

“While tariffs are tax increases that raise more revenue for the federal government, the revenue coming in is not enough to cover all the spending the President envisions,” she said.

During Trump’s first year in office, from January through December, the U.S. collected $264 billion from tariffs, according to the Treasury Department’s monthly statements. That is more than three times what tariffs brought in during the previous 12-month period, which was about $79 billion.

But many of the president’s new tariffs didn’t go into effect until the second half of the year, and the $264 billion includes already existing tariffs that the U.S. had regularly been collecting.

Projections from the Congressional Budget Office and the Tax Policy Center estimate that revenues from Trump’s new tariffs would average about $230 billion annually over the next decade, with somewhat higher returns in the near future and lower returns in later years as consumers shift away from buying imports.

But just the three policy priorities that Trump recently outlined would total at least $1 trillion, conservatively.

In a Jan. 7 post on Truth Social, Trump proposed a 50% increase to the military budget, bringing it to a total of $1.5 trillion, and said that the tariffs could “easily” pay for that while, at the same time, paying down the national debt and paying for “a substantial Dividend to moderate income Patriots within our Country!”

A breakdown of cost estimates for those three initiatives shows:

Military budget — As described by Trump, an increase from $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion would cost $500 billion.

National debt — The president hasn’t specified how much he would pay down the debt, but the current total debt is more than $38 trillion and rising quickly.

Dividend checks — Trump hasn’t presented details on the checks, and when we asked the White House for information, we didn’t get a response. But he previously said they would be $2,000 checks to be “paid to everyone” except “high income people.” Based on that, an analysis from Yale University estimated the total cost would be $450 billion, if the income limit were $100,000.

So, the total amount collected from tariffs in 2025 would cover only about half of the cost of either the military spending increase or the dividend checks, and it would cover less than 1% of the national debt.

Those three initiatives aren’t the only ones the president has said would be funded by tariff revenue, either. He has also said tariffs would cover military bonus payments and aid to farmers and might even raise enough revenue to one day eliminate income taxes.

We asked the White House for an explanation of how tariff revenue would cover the cost of all these proposals, but we didn’t receive a response.

Further complicating Trump’s claims that tariffs will pay for government programs and make the U.S. “so rich, you’re not going to know where to spend all that money,” is that he’s described conflicting goals. He has said both that tariffs are meant to “bring in tremendous amounts of money” — a goal that depends on a high volume of imports — and also that they are meant to encourage growth in U.S. manufacturing, reducing imported goods and, therefore, the taxes collected on them.

The president has used two primary avenues for imposing his increased tariffs — section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, which has never before been used to implement tariffs like this, according to legal experts.

So far, in the fiscal year that started in October — which also captures the time period during which most of the new tariffs were in effect — collections from the IEEPA tariffs have made up 67% of the total tariff revenue collected, according to data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

The question as to whether or not Trump can use the IEEPA to impose tariffs is before the U.S. Supreme Court, which is expected to rule soon.

During oral arguments for that case, the lawyer for the administration, Solicitor General D. John Sauer, argued that the tariffs under the IEEPA are legitimate because they are a negotiating tool rather than a means of raising tax revenue. “These are regulatory tariffs. They are not revenue-raising tariffs,” he said. “The fact that they raise revenue is only incidental. The tariffs would be most effective, so to speak, if no person ever paid them.”

Using the example of the national emergency regarding the trade deficit that Trump declared on April 2, Sauer explained further, “If you look at the trade deficit emergency, if nobody ever pays the tariffs and instead Americans direct their consumption towards American producers and stimulate the rebuilding of our hollowed-out manufacturing base, then the policy is by far the most effective.”

York pointed to this argument in saying, “The President has made many contradictory statements about his rationale for imposing tariffs. For tariffs to continue generating revenue, we need to continue importing goods into the United States. But if, as the administration argued before the Supreme Court, revenue is not the rationale and ideally the tariffs would generate no revenue, then the President should not plan to fund his expenditure plans with tariffs.”

Here’s a breakdown of six initiatives Trump has said tariff revenues would fund.

Replacing the Federal Income Tax

Trump has repeatedly and said that tariff revenue could potentially replace the federal income tax.

He said in the spring, “And it’s possible we’ll do a complete tax cut. Because I think the tariffs will be enough to cut all of the income tax.”

And he repeated the idea in the fall, saying, “And over the next couple of years, I think we’ll substantially be cutting — and maybe cutting out completely — but we’ll be cutting income tax, could be almost completely cutting it because the money we’re taking in is going to be so large,” referring to tariffs and trade deals.

As we’ve written before, there is a yawning gap between the revenues raised from personal income taxes versus those raised from tariffs. In fiscal year 2024, tariffs on imports accounted for less than 2% of the more than $4.9 trillion in federal receipts.

Using the most recent monthly Treasury report, the U.S. brought in a total of $484 billion during the month of December. Half of that — $242 billion — came from individual income taxes. Tariffs, however, made up about 6% of the total revenues — $28 billion.

“It is literally impossible for tariffs to fully replace income taxes,” Kimberly Clausing and Maurice Obstfeld, economists with the Peterson Institute for International Economics, wrote last year. “Tariff rates would have to be implausibly high on such a small base of imports to replace the income tax, and as tax rates rose, the base itself would shrink as imports fall, making Trump’s $2 trillion goal unattainable.”

Reducing or Eliminating the National Debt

The president frequently says that he will use tariff revenues to pay down the national debt, as he did in November, saying, “We’re going to be lowering our debt, which is a national security thing.”

The total national debt, including money the federal government owes to itself, is $38 trillion, as of this month.

As we said, the total amount brought in by tariffs in 2025 was $264 billion, which is less than 1% of the national debt.

Trump hasn’t said how much of the tariff revenue he would use to try to pay down the debt, but it’s worth noting that some of his policies are projected to further increase yearly deficits — and ultimately, the total debt. For example, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which extended parts of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act from his first term and introduced other new tax cuts, is projected by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office to increase budget deficits by $3.4 trillion from 2025 to 2034.

For comparison, the CBO has estimated that new tariff rates enacted from Jan. 6 to Nov. 15, 2025, will bring in about $2.5 trillion over 11 years, if those tariffs remain the same. The deficit reduction would be $3 trillion, including the impact on debt interest. So, the total tariff revenues aren’t even expected to cover the cost of a policy Trump has already enacted.

Increasing the Military Budget

The budget for the Department of Defense in fiscal year 2026 is about $900 billion.

In his Jan. 7 Truth Social post, Trump proposed raising that total budget by about 50%.

“I have determined that, for the Good of our Country, especially in these very troubled and dangerous times, our Military Budget for the year 2027 should not be $1 Trillion Dollars, but rather $1.5 Trillion Dollars,” he wrote.

“[B]ecause of Tariffs, and the tremendous Income that they bring … we are able to easily hit the $1.5 Trillion Dollar number,” Trump said.

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget has estimated that this proposed increase would total $5 trillion through 2035 and add $5.8 trillion to the national debt, including interest.

“In reality, the military spending increase would be about twice as large as expected tariff revenue,” the CRFB said.

‘Warrior Dividends’

“We’ve taken in hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs. We gave the military, the entire military … $1,776 dollars, that’s not bad,” Trump said on Dec. 31, referring to so-called “warrior dividend” bonus checks sent to military personnel in December.

When he announced the program on Dec. 17, the president said the bonuses were made possible by revenue from tariffs and the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

They were actually entirely funded by a $2.9 billion appropriation in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which passed in July –  a reallocation of funds initially earmarked for an increased housing allowance.

The $1,776 checks were sent to about 1.5 million active-duty and reserve military members, according to a post from the U.S. Army. That would put the total cost at about $2.6 billion.

Dividend Checks

The president has also promised tariff-revenue dividend checks to most Americans.

On Nov. 9, Trump posted on Truth Social, “A dividend of at least $2000 a person (not including high income people!) will be paid to everyone.”

He reiterated that pledge in his Jan. 7 post, but hasn’t offered any further details.

A Yale University analysis estimated that, based on the expectation that the program would provide $2,000 checks for those making under $100,000, it would cost $450 billion.

For reference, the last round of COVID-19 economic stimulus checks — which provided $1,400 to those making less than $75,000 and $1,400 per dependent — went to about 176 million people and cost just under $410 billion, according to the Government Accountability Office.

Farmer Bailout

After China slashed its purchase of American soy beans in 2025 following Trump’s imposition of additional tariffs, the administration announced a $12 billion aid payment for farmers.

“The Soybean Farmers of our Country are being hurt because China is, for ‘negotiating’ reasons only, not buying. We’ve made so much money on Tariffs, that we are going to take a small portion of that money, and help our Farmers,” Trump posted on Truth Social on Oct. 1.

During the official announcement on Dec. 8, he repeated the claim that the bailout would be funded by tariffs, saying, “because of the tariffs, this is possible.”

But the bailout is being paid for by the Commodity Credit Corporation, which provides funding for agricultural programs and gets regular appropriations from Congress, according to a press release from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

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Claim:

A photo authentically showed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents escorting a U.S. citizen wearing only underwear, shoes and a blanket in freezing temperatures out of his home in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Rating:

In January 2026, as immigration enforcement agents descended on Minnesota as part of Operation Metro Surge, a photo circulated online that social media users claimed (archived) showed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents escorting a U.S. citizen wearing only underwear, shoes and a blanket in freezing temperatures out of his home in St. Paul, Minnesota.

One X user wrote:

Yesterday, Reuters captured ICE breaking down a door and dragging a man out half-naked into the freezing cold in Saint Paul. According to his sister-in-law, they returned him after realizing he’s a naturalized U.S. citizen with no criminal record.

Claims about what the photo showed also circulated on Facebook (archived), Instagram (archived), Threads (archived), Bluesky (archived) and Reddit (archived). Snopes readers wrote in, asking whether claims that the photo showed ICE action in Minnesota were true.

The photo was authentic, meaning not generated by artificial intelligence. The photo was taken by Reuters photographer Leah Millis in St. Paul on Jan. 18, 2026. Millis’ caption read, “A man, whose family requested a Hmong interpreter, is detained after ICE agents and other law enforcement officers conducted an immigration raid at his home, days after an ICE agent fatally shot Renee Nicole Good, in St. Paul, Minnesota, U.S., January 18, 2026.”

Reuters and The Associated Press (archived) identified the man in the photo as 56-year-old ChongLy Thao. According to Thao’s interviews with both outlets, a family statement received by Snopes via email and a Department of Homeland Security statement on X about the Jan. 18 incident, Thao was a naturalized U.S. citizen. According to public Minnesota records, Thao had no criminal record.

Given the above, we rate this claim true.

Two pre-photo accounts of Jan. 18 immigration action

Reuters and The Associated Press both interviewed Thao, though reported accounts of the immigration enforcement action at his home varied slightly. Snopes could not independently verify these reports or the reason for the discrepancy.

For example, the reports differed on the events preceding the arrival of the ICE agents. Reuters reported that Thao was singing karaoke when agents arrived at his home, while the AP reported that he was napping.

Both reports said ICE agents broke down a door to enter Thao’s house while he, his daughter-in-law and his 4-year-old grandson were home. Both reports also said agents removed Thao from the house in the little clothes he was wearing, which was when the Reuters photographer took the photo of Thao and the agents.

According to the AP report, Thao’s daughter-in-law tried to find his ID before agents removed him from the home to prove he was a U.S. citizen. Agents reportedly said they “didn’t want to see it” before leading Thao away but later asked for it after driving him “to the middle of nowhere” and taking additional photographs of Thao. 

Both outlets reported that agents returned Thao when they established he was a U.S. citizen.

According to the National Weather Service, the high in downtown St. Paul on Jan. 18 was 14 degrees. Bystander video (archived) from the scene showed Thao struggling to keep his footing while stepping over mounds of snow at the roadside.

Family ‘disputes’ DHS account

Tricia McLaughlin, assistant DHS secretary, wrote on X that agents targeted Thao’s house in the hunt for two convicted sex offenders who were due to be deported. McLaughlin wrote: 

Yesterday in St. Paul, ICE conducted a targeted operation of 2 convicted sex offenders. One of the criminal targets had convictions for sex with a minor and sexual assault. The other target had convictions for sex assault with penetration in the first degree, domestic violence, and violating a protective order. Both also have convictions for failure to register as sex offenders. They both have final orders of removal from an immigration judge.

The US citizen lives with these two convicted sex offenders at the site of the operation. The individual refused to be fingerprinted or facially ID’d. He matched the description of the targets. As with any law enforcement agency, it is standard protocol to hold all individuals in a house of an operation for safety of the public and law enforcement. 

According to a statement sent to Snopes via email, Thao’s family wrote that “key assertions” in the DHS statement “do not reflect their firsthand knowledge of the events or the living situation at the residence.”

The family statement, signed by Louansee Moua, who identified herself as Thao’s sister-in-law on Facebook, continued: 

Mr. Thao is a United States citizen with no criminal record. The only individuals residing at the home are Mr. Thao, his adult son, his daughter-in-law, and his young grandson. The family does not know the individuals referenced in DHS’s statement.

ICE agents did not present a warrant to the family and did not request identification prior to detaining Mr. Thao. Mr. Thao did not resist and went with agents voluntarily, despite the absence of an explanation for his detention at the time.

According to the statement, the family is seeking legal counsel over the events of Jan. 18.

Snopes has previously reported extensively on immigration enforcement action in Minnesota in early 2026.

Summary

Since President Donald Trump returned to the White House:

• Job growth slowed, and the unemployment rate crept upward. Job-seekers now outnumber job openings.

• Price increases slowed according to the most commonly watched number. But they worsened according to the measure preferred by the Federal Reserve.

• Paychecks grew faster than inflation. Real weekly earnings of private-sector workers rose 1.4%.

• Economists estimate the economy grew 1.8%.

• Consumer sentiment declined.

• The number of apprehensions at the U.S. border with Mexico decreased 91.4%, while refugee admissions declined 98%.

• The international trade deficit decreased only slightly, by 0.9%.

• The stock market continued to set new records.

• The number of people receiving federal food assistance went down by about 1.2 million.

• Oil production went up 2.5%, while oil imports dropped 6.9%. Carbon emissions increased slightly.

• The number of murders nationwide continued to decline, a trend that began in 2022.

• The federal debt held by the public rose about 6.7%.

Analysis

Now that Trump has been back in office for one year, we’re publishing our first “Trump’s Numbers” article of his second term. That’s the schedule we have followed for these reports, which we launched in 2012. We wait a year when a new president is inaugurated to allow for the accumulation of some data on most of these metrics.

Going forward, we’ll provide quarterly updates throughout Trump’s term, as we did for his predecessors, and we’ll be able to include statistics that are missing from this report — household income, poverty and health insurance — once the data are released.

In a Jan. 13 speech, Trump himself cited “the numbers” for his economic record, making a healthy, and incorrect, use of superlatives. “By almost every metric, we have quickly gone from the worst numbers on record to the best and strongest numbers,” he said. “Just based on the numbers.”

While that’s clearly not accurate for “almost every metric,” the idea behind these articles isn’t to fact-check specific claims; rather, we simply provide the numbers. They may be expected or surprising, good or bad, depending on one’s point of view. We leave those opinions to readers, and we make no judgments as to how much credit or blame a president deserves for these measures.

Jobs and Unemployment

Job growth slowed and unemployment crept up during Trump’s second term. The number of unemployed now exceeds the number of job openings.

Employment — Employment continued growing during Trump’s first 11 months in office, but much more slowly than it had in the previous 11 months.

The most recent figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics show an increase of 473,000 in total nonfarm employment between January and December 2025. That’s barely more than one-quarter of the 1,782,000 jobs added between February 2024 and January 2025, when Trump began his current term.

(A note of caution: BLS has announced it will revise its monthly job figures substantially downward for March because its annual “benchmarking” study indicated its monthly survey had overcounted the number of jobs that month by 911,000. Updated figures going back to March 2024 are scheduled to be released in February along with the regular monthly employment report.)

Much of the sluggishness under Trump is due to the president’s deliberate slashing of the federal workforce. Federal government employment has fallen by 277,000, or 9.2%, since he took office.

Looking only at the private sector — excluding federal, state and local government workers — 654,000 jobs were added during Trump’s term so far. But that’s still less than half the 1,414,000 added in the preceding 11 months.

Back in August, Trump reacted to disappointing job-growth figures by calling them “rigged” and “phony” even though we found no evidence of that and the White House offered none. Trump fired BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer and nominated as her replacement E.J. Antoni, an economist at the conservative Heritage Foundation. Trump withdrew that nomination amid much criticism at the end of September and has yet to name a permanent replacement.

Meanwhile BLS reported a gain of only 50,000 jobs in the month of December. That’s even lower than the initial report of a 73,000 gain in July that prompted Trump to fire the BLS chief. The July gain has since been revised downward to 72,000.

Manufacturing Jobs — The economy continued to lose manufacturing jobs. During Trump’s first 11 months the loss was 63,000. That followed a loss of 98,000 in the preceding 11 months.

Labor Force Participation — The labor force participation rate declined a bit in Trump’s second term, dropping from 62.6% to 62.4%.

The rate is the portion of the population over age 16 that is working or seeking work. It generally has been in a long decline as the population ages and people retire.

Unemployment — The unemployment rate has remained well below the historical norm under Trump, but has gone up slightly since he took office. It was 4.0% in January 2025, and most recently was 4.4% in December.

The median rate for all months since 1948 is 5.5%.

Job Openings — The number of people officially listed as unemployed rose by 638,000 during Trump’s first 11 months, while the number of job openings declined by 616,000. There are now 7.5 million unemployed and seeking work, but only 7.1 million openings. When Trump took office, job opportunities outnumbered job-seekers.

Wages and Inflation

CPI — Trump campaigned on a promise to reduce inflation, and since he took office it has slowed little. Or maybe not. By one important measure it has worsened.

In the 12 months before Trump took office the Consumer Price Index, the most commonly cited measure of inflation, rose 3.0%. And in the most recent BLS report, the 12-month increase was 2.7%.

Over Trump’s first 11 months in office, the CPI went up 2.18%.

One particularly bright spot: The often volatile price of gasoline has eased. The national average price for regular gasoline at the pump was $3.11 the week Trump was sworn in for the second time, and had dropped to $2.78 by the week ending Jan. 12, according to the Energy Information Administration.

Inflation was much worse in 2022, when the 12-month CPI increase spiked at 9.1% in June. That was the largest 12-month increase in over 40 years. But inflation had slowed markedly by the time Trump came in.

Still, inflation remains higher than the Federal Reserve would like, and it’s going in the wrong direction as measured by the Fed’s preferred metric, the Personal Consumption Expenditures Index, compiled by the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

The central bank’s target is a 2% annual increase in the PCE. When Trump took office, the 12-month increase in the PCE was 2.5%. But the most recent report put the 12-month increase at 2.8%.

That was for the period ending in September. Not only do the PCE figures take longer to gather than the CPI, they have been delayed by the recent government shutdown. The next PCE release is now scheduled for Jan. 22 and will cover both October and November.

Wages — Wage increases accelerated under Trump, even adjusted for inflation.

The average weekly earnings of all private-sector workers, adjusted for inflation, rose 1.4% during Trump’s first 11 months. They were rising when he took office, but had only gone up 0.5% in the preceding 11 months.

Those figures include professionals, executives and supervisory employees, whose pay is normally higher. But rank-and-file wage earners are seeing gains just as rapid as those of their bosses. For private-sector production and nonsupervisory employees, real average earnings also rose 1.4% under Trump, after a 1.0% rise in the preceding period.

Economic Growth

After a weak first quarter, the economy showed surprising resilience in Trump’s first year back in office – largely on the strength of substantial artificial intelligence investments and household spending.

Although the first official annual estimate from the Bureau of Economic Analysis isn’t due to be released until Feb. 20, BEA data available so far show that real gross domestic product declined at an annual rate of 0.6% in the first three months of 2025 but then grew by 3.8% in the second quarter and 4.3% in the third quarter. 

The reported third-quarter growth was the largest in two years, when the economy expanded at an annual rate of 4.7%. Fourth quarter growth, which also won’t be released until Feb. 20, may be even higher. As of Jan. 14, the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s GDPNow model was projecting growth of 5.3%. 

“This strong growth came despite the adverse trade and immigration shocks the economy has absorbed over the past year,” resulting in a “soft labor market,” Joseph Brusuelas, chief economist at RSM, wrote in December after the third-quarter figures were released. “That interplay — a surging economy and a soft labor market — is likely to be the major economic narrative next year.”

Brusuelas described the economy as a “resilient beast.” He attributed the third-quarter growth to “[h]ousehold consumption driven by higher-income consumers and AI-related investment,” which he wrote “accounted for just under 70% of total growth during the [third] quarter.”

For the full year, Federal Reserve Board members and bank presidents expect growth to come in at between 1.5% and 2%, according to estimates released Dec. 10. Their median projection was 1.7%. Similarly, economists surveyed in October by the National Association for Business Economics estimated 1.8% growth in 2025.

Consumer Sentiment

When Trump took office, consumers surveyed by the University of Michigan expressed concern about unemployment and inflation and uncertainty about the potential impact of Trump’s economic agenda. 

“Concerns over the future trajectory of inflation were visible throughout the interviews and were tied to beliefs about anticipated policies like tariffs,” Joanne W. Hsu, director of the Surveys of Consumers, said in a press release last January, adding that “consumers of all political leanings will continue to refine their views as Trump’s policies are clarified and implemented.”

A year ago, the university’s survey showed that the consumer sentiment was 71.7.  Since then, consumer confidence has precipitously declined in subsequent surveys and remains stubbornly low. 

The university’s preliminary Index of Consumer Sentiment for January was 54 – 17.7 points lower than it was when Trump took office. By contrast, consumer sentiment never dropped below 71.8 in Trump’s first term, despite the economic turmoil caused by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020. 

Although those surveyed perceived some “modest improvement” in the economy in the last two months, consumer sentiment “remains nearly 25% below last January’s reading,” Hsu said. Consumers “continue to be focused primarily on kitchen table issues, like high prices and softening labor markets.”

In its most recent Consumer Confidence Survey, the Conference Board — a research organization with more than 2,000 member companies — also reported that consumer confidence declined for the fifth straight month in December.

“Despite an upward revision in November related to the end of the [government] shutdown, consumer confidence fell again in December and remained well below this year’s January peak,” Dana M. Peterson, chief economist of the Conference Board, said in a Dec. 23 press release. 

Home Prices & Homeownership

Homeownership — Homeownership rates have declined slightly since Trump became president.

The homeownership rate, which the Census Bureau measures as the percentage of “occupied housing units that are owner-occupied,” was 65.3% in the third quarter of 2025 — 0.4 points below the 65.7% rate during Biden’s last quarter in office.

Although mortgage rates eased in 2025, the homeownership rate in the third quarter “remained below last year’s pace because of ongoing affordability pressures,” according to Realtor.com. 

“Persistent affordability challenges and a shortage of reasonably priced homes have kept the rate from rising more meaningfully, though recent inventory gains, softer prices, and easing mortgage rates appear to be helping some previously sidelined households enter the market,” Realtor.com Senior Economic Research Analyst Hannah Jones said in a Dec. 12 article on the company’s website.

The highest homeownership rate on record was 69.2% in 2004, when George W. Bush was president. But millions of Americans lost their homes during the Great Recession, a financial crisis triggered by a housing market crash.

“Following record-high homeownership rates before the 2008 housing and financial crisis, homeownership rates have remained relatively static at the current rate of 65 percent,” HUD’s policy and research arm wrote in a July report on the history of homeownership in the U.S.

Home Prices — Home prices, which soared to new highs under Biden, slowed in Trump’s first year, as mortgage rates continued to fall. 

The national median price of an existing, single-family home sold in December was $409,500, according to the National Association of Realtors. That was 2.9% higher than it was in January, when Biden left office. 

Looked at another way: The median sales price in December was only 0.24% higher year-over-year. 

“2025 was another tough year for homebuyers, marked by record-high home prices and historically low home sales,” NAR Chief Economist Lawrence Yun said in a press release. “However, in the fourth quarter, conditions began improving, with lower mortgage rates and slower home price growth.”

The Federal Reserve lowered short-term interest rates three times in 2024. After a pause, the Fed cut rates three more times in 2025 – lowering rates last year by a full percentage point since September. While that’s not directly tied to mortgage rates, it can affect how banks set their loan rates.

As of Jan. 8, the average mortgage rate on a 30-year fixed rate mortgage was 6.16% — down from 6.96% for the week ending Jan. 23, 2025, according to Freddie Mac. Trump took office on Jan. 20, 2025.

Immigration

In his first year in office, Trump has followed through on his signature campaign promise to — as he puts it — “close the border,” with numerous executive actions that have dramatically reshaped immigration policy and enforcement.

“The border is totally secure,” Trump told reporters on Jan. 11.

The number of apprehensions at the U.S. border with Mexico decreased 91.4% during Trump’s first full 11 months in office, compared with the same period in 2024, according to the most recent figures released by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. The monthly average (7,255) was at a low not seen since the early 1960s.

Calculating the change in border apprehensions is the method we’ve used as a proxy to measure illegal border crossings for our Numbers stories going back to President Barack Obama. But in Trump’s case, that dramatic drop tells only part of the story of the sweeping immigration policy changes that the Migration Policy Institute describes as “unprecedented in their breadth and reach.”

“While some efforts have stalled or not yet met the White House’s lofty goals, the administration has dramatically reshaped the machinery of government to target unauthorized immigrants in the country, deter unauthorized border arrivals, make the status of many legally resident immigrants more tenuous, and impose obstacles for lawful entry of large swaths of international travelers and would-be immigrants,” MPI’s Muzaffar Chishti, Kathleen Bush-Joseph and Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh wrote in their Jan. 13 article, “Unleashing Power in New Ways: Immigration in the First Year of Trump 2.0.” The “net change,” the authors wrote, “has been dizzying in its scope and speed.”

The Trump administration has “dismantled longstanding norms,” the authors wrote, invoking “archaic statutes,” enlisting “support from state and local law enforcement as well as federal agencies that historically had no immigration enforcement role,” and pressuring “foreign governments to receive deportees,” the MPI report stated. “Perhaps most visibly, it militarized immigration enforcement.”

Trump has achieved his policy mostly through executive actions, rather than with legislative help, something he has boasted about repeatedly.

“Remember Biden, he said I have to get approval from Congress,” Trump said in a speech in Detroit on Jan. 13. “Had nothing to do with Congress, had to do with respect.”

In one of his first actions upon taking office in January 2025, Trump issued a proclamation that “the current situation at the southern border qualifies as an invasion under Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution of the United States.” He mostly blocked migrants’ ability to request asylum. He canceled humanitarian parole programs that the Biden administration extended to Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela. And he reinstated the “Remain in Mexico” policy, so that asylum seekers were sent to Mexico to await their court appearances in the U.S.

In December, Trump paused all asylum decisions at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. And on Jan. 14, the president indefinitely paused the processing of immigrant visas for 75 nations, including Afghanistan, Brazil, Egypt, Iran, Nigeria, Russia, Thailand, Somalia and Yemen. He had previously issued a full or partial ban on travel from 39 countries.

MPI estimated that in the first year of his second term, Trump has taken more than 500 actions on immigration including 38 executive orders and “hundreds of other actions via presidential proclamations and policy guidance.” That’s more actions than in all four years of Trump’s first term, MPI said.

But Congress has provided some help. In July, Republicans passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which included more than $170 billion to ramp up immigration enforcement, detention and deportation.

Increasingly, the administration has turned its attention to interior enforcement. According to MPI, “U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests have more than quadrupled since Trump took office, while average daily detention has doubled.”

In December, the Department of Homeland Security reported that its enforcement operations have resulted in more than 622,000 deportations since January 2025 (short of the stated goal of at least 1 million per year). And, DHS said, another “1.9 million illegal aliens have voluntarily self-deported,” some of whom were lured by government incentives — a free flight home and $1,000. MPI said the Trump administration hasn’t provided any data to back up that self-deportation claim.

A New York Times analysis of federal data disputed the administration’s figures, with its Jan. 17 analysis, covering Trump’s first year, estimating the number of deportations at 540,000, including 230,000 people who were detained inside the country, 270,000 deported at the border and 40,000 who signed up for the government incentives to self-deport. The Times speculated that the administration’s 622,000 figure “likely includes all repatriations carried out by various homeland security subagencies,” such as ship crews that are barred from disembarking.

Both the Times and MPI noted that DHS hasn’t released detailed, public reports on these statistics, as it has in the past.

In any case, the Times noted the number of deportations lagged the number in Biden’s last two years in office: 590,000 total deportations in 2023 and 650,000 in 2024, when border apprehensions were much higher than they are now. The number of people Trump has deported from inside the country, 230,000, is far higher than the 50,000 deported from inside the country in 2024.

Refugees

In his first term, Trump sharply reduced refugee admissions. But now they have nearly stopped entirely. 

As we wrote last year, Trump signed an executive order on his first day back in office that called for a “realignment” of the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, including an indefinite suspension of all admissions until the program “aligns with the interests of the United States.” 

There have been few exceptions to the new refugee policy – notably for refugees from South Africa’s white minority Afrikaner ethnic group. In making an exception for Afrikaners, Trump claimed there was “a genocide that’s taking place” against white farmers in the country – which, as we wrote, distorts the facts.  

Beginning in February, the U.S. has admitted only 1,226 refugees in Trump’s first full 11 months in office – including 1,059 refugees from South Africa, according to State Department data.  

By contrast, the U.S. admitted 70,033 during the same 11-month period, from February 2024 through December 2024, under Biden. That’s a staggering 98% decline. 

For fiscal year 2026, which began Oct. 1, 2025, Trump placed a cap of 7,500 on refugee admissions – which is far fewer than the 125,000 cap Biden instituted for fiscal year 2025. It’s also much less than the 45,000 cap that Trump placed on refugees in fiscal year 2018, which was his first full fiscal year as president during his first term. 

Other than refugees from South Africa, Trump was forced by a court ruling to admit some refugees who had plans to resettle in the U.S. when he suspended the program. 

As we wrote, an appeals court ruled (in a clarifying opinion issued April 21) that refugees who had an “approved refugee application” and “had arranged and confirmable travel plans” on or before Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order can enter the country. About 160 refugees were affected by that decision, a spokesman for the International Refugee Assistance Project told us for an article in September.

Most of the non-South Africans admitted last year came from Afghanistan. The U.S. admitted 100 Afghan refugees in the past 11 months, the State Department data show.

In addition to suspending the refugee program, Trump more recently has threatened to deport refugees who settled in Minnesota, citing an ongoing fraud investigation in that city.

In a Jan. 9 statement, the Department of Homeland Security said it is “reexamining thousands of refugee cases through new background checks and intensive verification of refugee claims,” beginning with “Minnesota’s 5,600 refugees who have not yet been given lawful permanent resident status (Green Cards).”

Trade

The international trade deficit, which Trump criticized for reaching record levels under Biden, decreased only slightly in the months since Trump took office for his second term.

Through his first full nine months in office, the U.S. imported $654 billion more in goods and services than it exported, according to the most recent data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. That’s about 0.9% less than the $659.7 billion gap between U.S. imports and exports during the same period in 2024.

The full impact of Trump’s new tariff policies on the trade imbalance is still to be determined. The New York Times noted that “because of a surge in imports earlier this year,” to avoid import tariffs that later went into effect, “the overall trade deficit from January to October was still up 7.7 percent from the previous year.”

Also, when the goods and services trade deficit for the month of October went down 60% year-over-year to $29.4 billion, the lowest monthly total since June 2009, the Times said that some economists attributed the decrease to “temporary fluctuations in trade in certain products, like gold and pharmaceuticals.”

Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, told the newspaper: “Cutting through the noise and getting to the underlying signal in the data, it suggests to me that the deficit is as large as its ever been.”

Corporate Profits

Corporate profits set records each year under Biden, but dipped in the first quarter under Trump before rebounding slightly in the second quarter and recovering fully in the third quarter. 

The Bureau of Economic Analysis reported that after-tax corporate profits at an annual rate were $3.59 trillion in the third quarter of 2025 – about $91 billion, or 2.6%, higher than the full-year figure for 2024.

The fourth quarter and annual figures for last year won’t be released until March, so it is still unclear if after-tax corporate profits for the full year will be up or down.

Under Biden, the annual average growth was 31% in 2021, 3.8% in 2022, 7.8% in 2023 and 7.9% in 2024, according to BEA data. 

Stock Market

The stock market, which set records during Biden’s presidency, reached new heights again under Trump.

The S&P 500, which is made up of 500 large-cap companies, closed at 15.7% higher on Jan. 16 than it was three days before Trump’s inauguration in January 2025.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average, made up of 30 large corporations, was up 13.5% over that same period.

And the Nasdaq composite index, comprising more than 3,000 companies, many in the technology sector, surged by almost 19.8% in that time frame.

These gains followed ample market increases during the Biden administration, when the S&P rose 57.8%, the Dow Jones went up 40.6%, and the Nasdaq increased by almost half.

Food Stamps

After a slight increase in enrollment during Biden’s presidency, the latest data from the Department of Agriculture show that under Trump fewer people are accessing benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps.

About 41.6 million people were receiving federal food assistance in September, according to preliminary USDA figures published last month. The number has gone down by about 1.2 million participants, or 2.8%, since Trump took office.

The number of individuals benefiting from SNAP is expected to decline further because of the Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which changed eligibility requirements for SNAP and is estimated to reduce federal spending on the program. For example, the law extends work requirements to include “able-bodied adults without dependents” aged 55 to 64, who were previously exempt.

In August, the Congressional Budget Office said that provisions in the law “will reduce participation in SNAP by roughly 2.4 million people in an average month over the 2025-2034 period.”

Crime

We won’t have annual 2025 crime data from the FBI until the fall. But other reports on part of the year show violent crime has continued to drop, a trend that began in 2022 after a spike in crime, particularly murders, in 2020.

AH Datalytics, an independent criminal justice data analysis group, produces a Real-Time Crime Index, an aggregation of crime data collected from 570 law enforcement agencies. That index shows a 19.8% decline in the number of murders for January to October 2025 compared with the same period in 2024. Longer term, the index shows the number of murders jumped in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, then leveled off and has been dropping since 2022.

The latest report from the Major Cities Chiefs Association, which compares Jan. 1 to Sept. 30, 2025, to the same period in the prior year, similarly found a 19.1% decline in the number of murders for 67 law enforcement agencies. The number of rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults also went down, with the latter decreasing by 10%.

A midyear 2025 report by the Council on Criminal Justice on 42 cities, which consistently published data since 2019, found the same trend, with crime levels now mostly below pre-pandemic levels. “Examining trends over a longer timeframe, violent crimes are below levels seen in the first half of 2019, the year prior to the onset of the COVID pandemic and racial justice protests of 2020,” the CCJ report said. It noted, though, that the drop in murders has been concentrated in a few cities.

“Much of the decline in the national homicide rate, which began in late 2022, has been driven by large drops in a few sample cities with high homicide levels, such as Baltimore and St. Louis,” CCJ said in a press release about its findings. “The most recent data show that all of the sample cities are now below the general peak of 2020 to 2021, but more than 60% continue to experience homicide levels above pre-2020 rates.”

Gun Sales

After reaching a record high in 2020, estimated gun sales declined every year that Biden was president. That downward trend continued during Trump’s first year back in office.

The government doesn’t collect data on gun sales. But the National Shooting Sports Foundation — the gun industry’s trade group — estimates gun sales by tracking the number of background checks for firearm sales based on the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System. The NSSF-adjusted figures exclude background checks unrelated to sales, such as those required for concealed-carry permits.

According to NSSF, the number of background checks for gun purchases in 2025 was roughly 14.6 million – down 4.1% from about 15.2 million in 2024. But the 2025 total was still higher than the almost 13.2 million estimated sales in 2019, before the pandemic.

Meanwhile, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has yet to publish its annual manufacturing figures, so we don’t know whether firearm production, specifically of handguns, increased or decreased in 2025. 

Debt and Deficits

Trump’s campaign pledge that “we’re going to actually start paying off debt” hasn’t happened yet. The publicly held debt increased by about one-third on Biden’s watch and continued to rise during the first year of Trump’s second term.

As of Jan. 14, the debt held by the public, which excludes money the federal government owes to itself, was almost $30.8 trillion – up about 6.7% from more than $28.8 trillion on Jan. 17, 2025, three days before he took office. 

Another annual deficit – close to $1.8 trillion in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30 – was a key factor. It was the fourth highest fiscal deficit of all time (behind FY 2020, FY 2021 and FY 2024) and the sixth consecutive budget gap of more than $1 trillion.

Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency had promised to cut federal spending by at least $1 trillion, a goal it did not achieve. Instead, federal spending went up a bit in fiscal 2025.

And, so far, the U.S. appears headed for another debt-increasing deficit in FY 2026 – although perhaps a smaller one. From October through December, the first quarter of the current fiscal cycle, the CBO said that federal outlays exceeded revenues by $601 billion. That’s about $110 billion less than the deficit in the same quarter of fiscal 2025.

Oil Production and Imports

Trump campaigned on a promise that the U.S. would “drill, baby, drill” during a second Trump term, and on his first day back in office, he signed an executive order with a stated goal of “unleashing American energy.”

As of October, U.S. crude oil production had increased to an average of 13.6 million barrels per day in Trump’s first full nine months in the White House, according to the most recent data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That’s up almost 2.5% from the same nine-month period in 2024. 

Before Trump was inaugurated, and before any of his policies were in place, the EIA had already projected in its monthly Short-Term Energy Outlook that average daily production would increase to a record 13.5 million barrels a day in 2025.

U.S. crude oil imports are trending in the opposite direction.

Imports were down to an average of about 6.1 million barrels per day during Trump’s first full nine months — a decrease of 6.9% from nearly 6.6 million barrels per day during the comparable period a year earlier. During the Biden years, average imports increased annually.

Carbon Emissions

EIA data also show a small increase in U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from energy consumption under Trump

There were approaching 3.2 billion metric tons of emissions from the consumption of coal, natural gas and various petroleum products in his first full eight months in office. That was roughly 1.4% more than the over 3.1 billion metric tons that were emitted from consuming those energy sources during the same stretch in 2024.

In early January 2025, the EIA projected that CO2 emissions would increase slightly in 2025, but remain in the ballpark of 4.8 billion metric tons emitted in 2024. The agency said it expected emissions growth due to the increased consumption of petroleum products across multiple sectors, particularly the use of diesel fuel and jet fuel.

Emissions had declined in 2023 and 2024 after increasing in Biden’s first two years as president.

Health Insurance

We don’t yet have data on how health insurance coverage has changed so far under Trump’s second term. Typically, the National Health Interview Survey has released quarterly preliminary reports on the insurance status of Americans. But the NHIS’ website now says that as of 2025, the data will only be released biannually.

The latest report, posted in June 2025, covers calendar year 2024. The NHIS is a project of the National Center for Health Statistics at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

A report on estimates from the survey for January to June 2025 is scheduled to be released on Jan. 30.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which Trump signed into law in July, is expected to prompt a rise in the number of people who lack health insurance, starting next year. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated the uninsured would increase by 10 million people over 10 years, with most of the increase due to the law’s changes to Medicaid. For 2026, the rise was estimated at 1.3 million people. (See the link to estimated changes in people without health insurance.)

In 2024, the last year of Biden’s term, 8.2% of the population, or 27.2 million people, were uninsured, according to the NHIS’ estimates, which measure those uninsured at the time they were interviewed. A Census Bureau report, released in September and measuring those who were uninsured for the entire calendar year, similarly put the uninsured rate at 8%.

Under Biden’s full term, the percentage and number of Americans who are uninsured declined, as we explained in our “Biden’s Final Numbers” report.

Judiciary Appointments

In his first term, Trump filled one-third of the Supreme Court, nearly 30% of the appeals court seats and nearly 26% of District Court seats. So far in his second term, the judiciary confirmation numbers lag a bit behind those in Biden’s first year.

Supreme Court — There hasn’t been a vacancy on the Supreme Court during the first year of Trump’s second term, just as there wasn’t a vacancy in Biden’s first year.

Court of Appeals — As of Jan. 16, Trump has won confirmation for six U.S. Court of Appeals judges. At the same point in his term, Biden had won confirmation for 12.

District Court — Twenty-one Trump nominees to be District Court judges have been confirmed, while 29 were confirmed at the same point in Biden’s first year.

Two U.S. Court of Federal Claims judges also were confirmed in Biden’s first year. None have been confirmed so far under Trump, and there are no vacancies for such positions.

As of Jan. 16, there were no vacancies for Court of Appeals judges, 39 for District Court judges with five nominees pending, and one vacancy for the international trade court.

Sources

We provide links to the sources for these statistics throughout the article.

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Claim:

Authentic footage from a gala held at Mar-a-Lago in January 2026 showed dancers wearing historic aristocratic costumes and dog masks.

Rating:

In January 2026, photographs and videos circulated online allegedly showing dancers at U.S. President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, wearing historic European aristocratic costumes and dog masks.

Some social media users poked fun at the alleged footage, with California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office joking that the club was hosting a “furry party”— referring to a subculture of people with a strong interest in humanoid animals. 

The videos and photos are authentic but unrelated to the furry community. They show scenes from the Hero Dog Awards Gala hosted by the American Humane Society (AHS), an animal welfare organization, at Mar-a-Lago on Jan. 9, 2026. We verified the footage by cross-checking videos and photos posted by attendees with those shared by several Instagram accounts tagged by the official AHS account. Accordingly, we rate the claim that the photos and videos shared online were taken at Mar-a-Lago as true.

We reached out to AHS to learn more about the inspiration behind such costumes and will update this story if we receive a response.

The Hero Dog Awards Gala is an annual fundraiser held by AHS that recognizes inspirational dogs in several categories: therapy dogs, service and guide dogs, military dogs, law enforcement and first responder dogs, and shelter dogs. Each year, hundreds of dogs are nominated, with five semi-finalists selected per category, which are then whittled down to five finalists.

The AHS official Instagram account tagged the following finalist Instagram accounts run by the dog’s handlers: lieutenant_dan_the_twc, k9_ultra_uscg and donald.tg.dog, among others. These accounts posted footage of the dogs at the gala, accompanied by their handlers, as well as footage and photographs of individuals dancing in Marie Antoinette-style gowns and wearing dog masks.

(Instagram user k9_ultra_uscg)

The same accounts also shared pictures of Trump speaking at the event.

(Instagram user k9_ultra_uscg)

(Instagram user harrison_esd_k9)

A search of Instagram for user-generated footage from the party, using Mar-a-Lago location tags, uncovered numerous videos captured by other attendees from multiple angles. Such footage can be seen here, here (archived), here (archived), here (archived) and here (archived).

(Instagram user usa_life_with_uma)

(Instagram user usa_life_with_uma)

Several attendees also posted photographs of themselves with the dancers dressed in costumes and dog masks:

(Instagram user missmodelusa)

(Instagram user usa_life_with_uma)

(Instagram user riflenumber13)

Various attendees posted footage of Trump arriving and speaking at the event on Instagram, seen here (archived), here and here. Media coverage and photographs of Trump arriving at Palm Beach International Airport show he was spending the weekend of Jan. 9 at Mar-a-Lago and was thus present at the gala. 

Details in the above clips, including background elements, decor and multiple videos showing people posing with the dancers from different angles, indicated that the gala took place at Mar-a-Lago and featured dancers wearing those costumes.

Previously, we have covered authentic footage taken at Mar-a-Lago that showed women dancing in giant cocktail glasses at Trump’s “Great Gatsby” party. 

On Jan. 15, 2026, French President Emmanuel Macron said France was now providing two-thirds of Ukraine’s intelligence. Shortly after, a rumor gained traction that Ukraine relied so heavily on French intelligence because Ukraine had allegedly given the U.S. false intelligence that the U.S. then leaked to Russia, uncovering the U.S. as an unreliable intelligence partner for Ukraine. 

Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, starting a war that was ongoing in early 2026. 

The claim spread on X, Substack, Medium, Bluesky and Reddit. Several posts, including a Facebook post by a page named The Liberal Agenda (archived), featured a screenshot of an X post by user Luc Rombout. The screenshot read:

Interesting message on French newschannel LCI:
“Ukrainian intell services sent false strategic info to US intell services… and observed that the information had been relayed to RUS and was used by RUS forces.”
=> total replacement of US as Intell partner with FRA, GBR, DEU [France, the U.K., Germany]

“Trump is leaking intelligence about our allies to Russia,” the caption on the Facebook post said. 

Snopes could find no evidence confirming the rumor Ukraine had shared false information with the U.S. Instead, this claim appeared to stem from a misunderstanding of an interview that aired on Jan. 16, 2026, on the French news television channel LCI. 

The interview subject was Vincent Crouzet, who formerly worked at the Directorate General for External Security (DGSE), France’s foreign intelligence agency. He said in the interview, without citing his sources, that Ukrainian intelligence officials suspected the U.S. had leaked information to Russia, causing Ukraine to stop sharing intelligence with the U.S.

Asked to clarify his assertion that the U.S. had leaked Ukrainian intelligence to Russia, Crouzet said in a Jan. 18 X post (archived), translated:

No, I did not say that: I said Ukrainians suspected risks of information leaks from the U.S. to the Russians.

Snopes contacted Crouzet to ask him what evidence he could provide that Ukrainians suspected intelligence leaks from the U.S. to Russia and whether there was any reason to believe Ukraine had fed the U.S. false information. We will update this report if we receive a response. 

Due to the fact that we could not verify or disprove these details independently, we did not give this report a rating.

The interview that sparked the rumor

The rumor spread, in part, via the screenshot of the X post by Rombout, who identified himself on his LinkedIn page as the head of a crisis management center in Belgium. 

Rombout’s post appeared to reshare a video clip posted on the 24H Pujadas account. 24H Pujadas is a program on LCI, considered reputable in France. 

The clip itself was genuine and not created or altered using artificial intelligence (AI) editing tools. Snopes identified an X post by the TV program 24H Pujadas with the video clip (archived) and a full video of the segment on the day it aired, Jan. 16, 2026. The presenter on that day was French journalist Yves Calvi.

Rombout seemingly deleted his original X post that made the claim. In a later post, he said in French that he was quoting the discussion in the French news program, implying that the claim did not originate with him.

A review of the televised interview showed Crouzet saying, in the context of discussing Macron’s speech announcing France was now providing two-thirds of Ukraine’s intelligence, that two Ukrainian intelligence officials had decided to stop sharing intelligence with the U.S. due to a lack of trust (emphasis ours):

So this announcement went a bit under the radar, yet it is essential. It is essential in two ways. First because it marks the divorce between Ukrainian intelligence and U.S. intelligence, because if we [France] supply two-thirds of Ukraine’s intelligence, I can well imagine that the last third is supplies by other European partners — in this case, Germany and the U.K.

When did this divorce happen? It happened on Feb. 28, 2025, during the famous session in the Oval Office, which created a break in the trust between Ukrainian intelligence and U.S. intelligence, to the point where the two leaders of Ukrainian intelligence — so, Vasyl Malyuk for the SBU [Security Service of Ukraine] and Kyrylo Budanov … you can see them on the screen … for the GUR [Main Directorate of Intelligence, military intelligence] — decided to no longer share effective intelligence they had with their U.S. partner due to U.S. leaks to Moscow.

Rombout’s X post seemingly misinterpreted some details. At no point did Crouzet say Ukraine had fed the U.S. false information and then tracked that information to Russia. We reached out to Rombout for his response to our findings about the possible translation error, and we will update this report if we receive a response.

For further reading, Snopes examined a rumor spread by Russian hackers that 1.7 million Ukrainians died or went missing during the war with Russia.

In January 2026, a rumor spread online that Iran’s government had issued a direct assassination threat to U.S. President Donald Trump. 

Several social media posts shared the claim, including one on Facebook that said Iran warned, “This time it will not miss the target,” referencing a previous assassination attempt on Trump:

(Facebook page Worldstar Hip Hop)

The rumor also gained traction on X and Reddit, with some posts claiming Iran’s state-run television channel had made the threat against Trump. Some posts gave different versions of the alleged quote, such as “This time bullet won’t miss target.”

Snopes readers searched our website to confirm whether the rumor was true. 

The claim originated from an article published by right-leaning tabloid the New York Post on Jan. 14, 2026, alleging that Iran made a “sickening assassination threat against Trump.” 

Citing French news agency Agence France Presse (AFP), the Post reported that Iranian state-run TV aired a photo of Trump from the assassination attempt at a campaign event in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, 2024, alongside the words, “This time it will not miss the target.” 

The article included a purported screenshot of the broadcast that circulated widely on X. The image showed a sign featuring an authentic photograph of Trump with blood on his cheek taken during the assassination attempt in Butler, when a bullet hit his ear.

Words in Farsi, Iran’s official language, were also visible on the sign. According to the translation tool DeepL. the text translated to “This time, there will be no mistakes.” A person fluent in both Farsi and English also confirmed the translation.

(X user @AlinejadMasih)

According to the Farsi speaker, the white words on a blue background below the sign translated to, “Funeral procession for 100 shaheeds [martyrs] and security defenders.”

Snopes could not independently verify that Iran’s state-run television channel broadcast the sign or that it constituted a direct threat from Iran’s government to Trump. For these reasons, we left this claim unrated. We have contacted the channel in question, Islamic Republic of Iran News Network (IRINN), and will update this report if they respond.

We also reached out to experts on Iranian authorities’ methods of information warfare to ask if it is plausible that the Islamic Republic of Iran would issue such a threat in this manner. We await a response. 

What AFP reported

As the Post noted, AFP reported on a funeral ceremony for members of the Islamic government’s security forces who died during confrontations between protesters and law enforcement in late 2025 and early 2026. AFP said several signs appeared during the ceremony. A section of the report read (emphasis ours):

At Wednesday’s funeral ceremony in Tehran, thousands of people waved flags of the Islamic republic as prayers were read out for the dead outside Tehran University, according to images broadcast on state television.

“Death to America!” read banners held up by people attending the rally, while others carried photos of supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Another image could be seen at the rally showing Trump’s assassination attempt, captioned: “This time it will not miss the target.”

It appeared to be referring to the assassination attempt against Trump during a campaign rally in 2024.

In other words, AFP did not suggest that the sign was a direct threat from Iran’s government toward Trump, contrary to claims by the Post and some X users. 

Some X users, including Iranian-American journalist Masih Alinejad (who says she survived assassination attempts by the Islamic Republic of Iran), said that no such image would appear on IRINN without the approval of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, suggesting it represented a direct threat (archived): 

Islamic Republic State TV has just broadcast an image of Trump from the Butler rally after he was shot, alongside the message: “This time, it won’t miss.” 

Let’s be absolutely clear: State TV in Iran run directly under the supervision of @khamenei_ir and nothing like this airs without approval from the very top of the regime.

We asked the IRINN for a response to Alinejad’s assertion, but did not receive one by the time of publication.

For further reading, Snopes has fact-checked a video purporting to show a demonstration in Iran in recent weeks.

Did MLK Say ‘Darkness Cannot Drive Out Darkness; Only Light Can Do That’?

Jan. 21, 2024

The late Rev. King is frequently misquoted on the internet, and, as always, we’re here to clear …

Read More

On Jan. 12, 2026, according to social media posts and reporting by the St. Paul Pioneer Press, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents detained special education classroom assistant Christina Rank after a confrontation with the agents in her employer’s parking lot in a Minneapolis suburb.

Snopes readers wrote in looking for more information about the incident. It was true that ICE agents detained Rank — a staff member at Concord Education Center in Inver Grove Heights, a southern suburb of the Twin Cities — in the school’s parking lot, though the circumstances surrounding the detainment were unclear. 

The Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) version of what happened differed from the social media posts. 

At some point, ICE vehicles and a vehicle driven by Rank collided in the parking lot, according to DHS and bystanders’ videos. But it was unclear who hit whom. Bystanders in footage shared online claim the ICE agents hit Rank, while agents in that footage and the DHS allege Rank hit the agents.

DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin provided the following email statement:

On January 12, while ICE law enforcement were parked in a parking lot in Inver Grove, MN a vehicle belonging to a U.S. citizen pulled up next to the agents, asked if they were ICE, and began honking her horn and yelling  “you are terrorists.” 

ICE departed the parking lot and she proceed to stalk law enforcement officers and moved her vehicle dangerously getting close to them. As ICE agents attempted to turn, the individual tried to cut their vehicle off and collided with law enforcement’s vehicle.

Officers then attempted to get her out of the vehicle and arrest her for obstruction—a federal crime. The woman refused and disobeyed commands. ICE officers followed their training and used the minimum amount of force necessary to make the arrest.

During this entire incident, a large crowd of agitators began to gather and blow whistles while yelling at officers. As the crowd grew and the situation became dangerous, the officers departed the area. Secretary Noem has been clear: Anyone who actively obstructs or impedes law enforcement will be prosecuted.

Snopes attempted to contact Rank and her mother, who had previously spoke about her daughter’s detainment with the Pioneer Press newspaper. We will update this report if we hear back.

Because Snopes could not independently verify the circumstances surrounding Rank’s detainment, we did not put a rating on this article.

Footage recorded by bystanders moments after ICE agents detained Rank in the parking lot showed two SUVs boxing in a white sedan, presumably the 25-year-old’s, while bystanders argued with ICE agents. 

After one ICE agent said the arrest was “because she rammed my vehicle,” a bystander yelled back, “No, I was right in front of her. You rammed her vehicle.” That bystander also claimed he recorded the incident showing agents ramming into Rank’s vehicle on his dashboard camera. 

Snopes reached out to the social media user who posted the video depicting bystanders’ comments, including the claim about dashcam footage. We have not heard back, and we did not find the alleged dashcam footage online.

According to the Pioneer Press, Rank’s mother said Rank’s car was damaged on the “passenger side door and the back window,” claiming that the front bumper would have been damaged if DHS’ version of events were true. No images of the allegedly damaged car were available online. Snopes was unable to independently confirm this detail.

The Pioneer Press reported that Rank’s mother said she received a phone call from her daughter on the morning of the incident, saying she did not know why she was being detained. According to that article, Rank was released at 7 p.m., about 12 hours after she was detained. It was unclear whether she had been charged with any crimes. 

Snopes was able to geolocate social media footage of the incident to the entrance of the parking lot at Concord Education Center by matching the positions of street signs and a senior living facility across the street.

According to Intermediate School District 917, the area’s special education school district, the Concord Education Center is a site for students with disabilities. The school district’s website says programming at Concord “provides services to students with unique needs from kindergarten through age 22 who require a high level of support provided by a separate school site dedicated to students receiving special education services.” 

In addition to reaching out to DHS, Snopes attempted to contact ICE about the incident. In both inquiries, we asked why ICE agents were stationed at the school prior to the confrontation with Rank. McLaughlin’s statement did not address that specific question and we had not heard back from ICE.

Snopes has reported on other incidents involving agents with ICE or Customs and Border Protection in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area in early 2026, including the arrests of Brandon Siguenza and Sue Tincher, a video showing agents kneeing a man in the face and the fatal shooting of Renee Good.

In January 2026, a rumor spread online that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) hired, with minimal vetting, an independent journalist who had openly criticized ICE and its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). 

The claim originated from the journalist herself, Laura Jedeed, whose article appeared in Slate, a left-leaning online news magazine. On Jan. 13, 2026, Jedeed posted a link to her report on X (archived). The headline read: “You’ve Heard About Who ICE Is Recruiting. The Truth Is Far Worse. I’m the Proof.” Her X post read:

A few months ago, ICE hired me

I didn’t sign and submit any paperwork. I’m real outspoken about my opinion of the Trump administration, and I am extremely googlable

And yet, there it was, in plain English. “Welcome to ICE!”

Several Snopes readers emailed us to verify the story, in part because DHS denied Jedeed’s claim in an X post. Calling Jedeed’s story a “lazy lie,” the government agency appeared to concede that the journalist may have received a “tentative selection letter” — a letter informing her that she had successfully passed the interview stage but requested more documentation. This letter that was not a job offer, however (archived). The DHS X post read:

This is such a lazy lie.

This individual was NEVER offered a job at ICE.

Applicants may receive a Tentative Selection Letter following their initial application and interview that is not a job offer. It just means they are invited to submit information for review, similar to any other applicant.

At Snopes’ request, Jedeed forwarded us alleged evidence of the communications she received from a federal government hiring platform and human resources at ICE. We reviewed the emails, documents, images and video footage.

Snopes sent that documentation from Jadeed to the DHS, asking for its response to the journalist’s claim that ICE hired her as a deportation officer. The agency did not return our inquiry, though we will update this report if that changes.

We verified the domain names and links in Jedeed’s documentation, confirming they lead to websites related to ICE and the hiring platform (usastaffing.gov). As part of our review of documentation related to an alleged drug test for the application, we confirmed the identity of an employee of a health care company who had supposedly messaged with Jadeed about the purported screening. 

Firsthand verification of Jadeed’s account on ICE’s hiring platform would help Snopes confirm her story. However, Jedeed said she lost access to her account after she declined the job offer, though she provided a video recording allegedly showing her navigating the tool previously. The internet address in the recording was legitimate.

There was no indication that the documentation Jadeed provided Snopes was inauthentic. However, due to the fact that we could not directly see her account on the federal government hiring platform, we could not give this rumor a rating. DHS provided no proof of its claim that Jedeed was lying. 

Jedeed’s documentation

Jedeed provided a screen recording she captured while navigating what seemed to be an online hiring portal for ICE. She shared one version of the recording on X, with private information removed. Snopes reviewed the unaltered recording (archived).

Contradicting DHS’ claim that Jedeed lied about being hired, the video showed a series of green checks in what seemed to be a tracker for her application. Per the clip, Jedeed reached the “onboarding” phase of the hiring process, past the “final offer” phase. At 0:36, the screen read:

5 of 5 Onboarding

Welcome to Ice as a . Your duty location is New York, New York. Your EOD [Entry on Duty] was on Tuesday, September 30, 2025. 

(Laura Jedeed)

Later in the video (0:49), Jedeed clicked on the “pre-employment” tab — the third phase according to the presumed tracker. The tab showed several tasks completed as of Oct. 6, 2025, labeled “physical,” “medical,” and “background investigation.” The drug test appeared completed earlier, on Sept. 25, 2025.

(Laura Jedeed)

Jedeed sent Snopes a Sept. 3, 2025, email with the subject line “Tentative Selection Letter (DHA) -Jedeed, Laura -“. This appeared to be the letter referenced in DHS’ X post. It said she had been “tentatively selected” for the position of “Deportation Officer, GL-1801-5″ in New York: 

(Laura Jedeed)

The email included documents and forms: a self-reported physical fitness test, medical self-certification and screening by a physician confirming the applicant’s medical fitness for joining law enforcement. It said she would have to complete a drug test in order to be hired. Snopes found the physical fitness test, a self-assessment form, on Page 20 of a 2022 ICE handbook. We also found the same law enforcement medical clearance form on the ICE website.

Drug test and ‘tentative job offer’

Jedeed also shared documentation related to the drug test, including two emails from a homeland security case manager at the health care company that works with the federal government, DOCS Health. That person, whom Snopes won’t be naming to protect their privacy, sent her a reference number and request to do the drug test at a Labcorp branch in Brooklyn, New York, before 10:19 a.m. on Sept. 24, 2025, according to Jadeed’s documentation.

Snopes verified the case manager has been employed at DOCS since November 2024, based on social media history and websites with employee data. The case manager’s social media profile described the job as: “Organizes pre-employment medical exams and drug screenings for applicants to the Department of Homeland Security.”

In her Slate article, she stated she had smoked marijuana six days before the drug screening and she was certain she would not pass it. However, Jadeed said she completed the drug test. The video recording of of her account on the hiring platform appeared to confirm she had passed it on Sept. 25, 2025 — the day after she was due to take it.

The case manager’s email to Jedeed corroborated the information in Jedeed’s screen recording she sent to Snopes. We contacted the case manager asking for more details, and we will update this report if we hear back. 

Lastly, Jedeed provided Snopes with a document that appeared to be a Dec. 8, 2025, email from “Human Resources Operations Center (HROC) Staffing Office of Human Capital, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.” This email seemed to acknowledged that she had declined the “tentative job offer” (we underlined the phrase in red):

(Laura Jedeed)

For further reading, Snopes previously investigated ICE’s legal authority to arrest U.S. citizens.

Claim:

NASA technology discovered a “super-Earth” exoplanet emitting “strange signals.”

Rating:

What’s True

Scientists using NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite discovered an exoplanet, which NASA defines as any planet beyond our solar system.

What’s False

However, the “strange signals” turn of phrase came from reports and social media posts about the discovery, not NASA or the researchers involved. The alleged “strange signals” are actually commonly observed transit signals, which “reveal an exoplanet not because we directly see it from many light-years away, but because the planet passing in front of its star ever so slightly dims its light,” according to NASA.

A rumor circulating on social media in January 2026 claimed that scientists had discovered a “super-Earth” outside our solar system.

One post on X alleged that the so-called super-Earth, named TOI-1846b, was 154 light-years away and emitting “mysterious, repeating” signals. 

The claim echoed similar rumors from July 2025, such as an Instagram post (archived) that offered more details about the purported discovery, including that the planet was “about twice the size of Earth” and that it was made using NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite.  

Indeed, claims that scientists discovered a new exoplanet using TESS are mostly true. The discovery was made by a research team based at the Oukaimeden Observatory in Morocco who “validated TOI-1846b using TESS and multicolor ground-based photometric data, high-resolution imaging, and spectroscopic observations,” according to a paper published by the discovery team. 

However, there’s some important context to understand. 

For instance, the reports of signals described as “mysterious” or “strange” by users on social media and tabloids like the Daily Mail were embellished to entice readers, which is why we’ve rated this claim as mostly true. Claims suggesting that the discovery of TOI-1846b can be attributed to anything otherworldly, unfamiliar or otherwise “strange” emanating from the exoplanet were inaccurate. 

Rather, the scientists in question engaged a method commonly used for detecting exoplanets by measuring transit signals or a “dip” in starlight captured by scientific instruments due to a planet passing in front of the star it orbits. A NASA spokesperson explained to Snopes via email:

When a planet passes directly between us and a star, the planet blocks some of the starlight from reaching us. For a brief period of time, the star’s light gets dimmer from our viewpoint. That small change can alert astronomers to the presence of a planet around a distant star. This change is known as a transit signal, and it is one of the main methods scientists use to discover exoplanets, or planets outside our solar system.

“TESS’ mission was designed to discover thousands of exoplanets this way,” NASA told Snopes. “Using data from TESS, as the authors of this study did, scientists have found planets ranging from small, rocky worlds to giant planets.”

According to the paper laying out the research behind the discovery, “TOI-1846b is a super-Earth-sized planet, with a radius of approximately 1.8R⊕, placing it within the intriguing radius valley area of exoplanet sizes.” 

NASA defined “super-Earth” as “unlike anything in our solar system, these are 2 to 10 times the mass of Earth, but smaller than Neptune, and can be made of gas, rock or a combination of both.” Researchers said their discovery “most probably has a water-rich bulk composition based on its radius.” 

Further, NASA explained the “radius valley” as “what seems to be a strange gap in planet sizes” that could impact the type of terrain the planet features, such as “rocky super-Earths, and the more substantial, gasrich mini-Neptunes,” according to the research paper. NASA also noted it “will require a far better understanding of how planetary systems form” to fully explain said radius valley. 

According to a report about the discovery from the science website Earth.com, “the size and weight combination” on TOI-1846b “gives it a density lighter than solid rock but heavier than planets with thick, gassy envelopes.” 

Additionally, the report from the discovery team stated, “Such planets are relatively rare, and their study can provide vital clues about planet formation and evolution processes.” 

The report also stated that M dwarf stars, such as the one TOI-1846b orbits, are “promising candidates for the search of small, temperate exoplanets using transit methods” because the “transit signal is significantly more pronounced than that of similar planets orbiting Sun-like stars, making such planets easier to detect and characterize.”

According to NASA, exoplanets are divided into four categories: “Gas giant, Neptunian, super-Earth, and terrestrial.” NASA’s Exoplanet Archive stated there are more than 6,000 confirmed exoplanets, with 725 of those confirmed by TESS since the satellite launched in April 2018. 

The Exoplanet Archive does not currently list TOI-1846b, but a NASA spokesperson said “there may be a small delay in updates” to the site. 

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