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Tag: Border security

  • Bondi says human smuggling is ‘getting people killed’ across US as she announces crackdown

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    Attorney General Pam Bondi has announced the expansion of Joint Task Force Alpha (JTFA), an initiative to thwart transnational criminal organizations and cartels that fuel human trafficking and smuggling.

    At a press conference in Tampa, Florida Thursday, Bondi warned that “the cost of human smuggling is huge” and that the deadly networks “are getting people killed.”

    She went on to describe JTFA as a key weapon in the war against organized smuggling networks, often led by cartels and “coyotes” who profit from migrants trying to cross U.S. borders.

    “We are investigating and prosecuting their crimes more aggressively than ever. And Joint Task Force Alpha is the tip of the spear,” she added.

    US ACCUSES VENEZUELAN REGIME OF NARCO-TERRORISM OVER ALLIANCES WITH TREN DE ARAGUA, SINALOA CARTEL

    Pam Bondi announces expansion of Joint Task Force Alpha to combat human trafficking and smuggling by cartels at U.S. borders. (AP)

    “These operations are getting people killed,” Bondi said. “The cost of human smuggling is huge. So many families are dying.”

    The Attorney General also detailed how one smuggling ring coached their clients, including children who came to airports alone and were put on planes for connecting flights.

    “They charged up to $40,000 per victim,” she said. “They used Zelle to transfer over $7 million over the course of this scheme, and I believe they had cash profit of over 18 million.”

    Bondi told reporters that since President Donald Trump took office, JTFA had already charged 56 defendants tied to smuggling conspiracies. 

    She highlighted one case involving what she called a “monster” who tried to transport migrants across the U.S.-Canada border, resulting in deaths from exposure.

    AMERICANS IN VACATION HOT SPOT MAY SEE MORE MILITARY THAN MARGARITAS THIS SUMMER

    Soldiers patrol for cartel

    Soldiers patrol the streets of Aguililla, Michoacan state, Mexico, on March 11, 2022 after violent cartel activity.  (Getty Images)

    Other Texas officials at the press event outlined specific cases underscoring the cruelty of smuggling operations.

    U.S. Attorney Justin R. Simmons, Western District of Texas said children as young as three had suffered THC poisoning after traffickers gave them drug-laced gummies to keep them calm and “compliant throughout the process.”

    “The cartels see kids like cocaine,” he said, describing how children are treated as expendable in the billion-dollar illicit trade.

    U.S. Attorney Nicholas J. Ganjei, Southern District of Texas added the cartels “do not care if you or your children have access to food, water, or even air to breathe. They do not care if you live or die.”

    Launched in June 2021 under then Attorney General Merrick Garland, JTFA was created to target the most prolific human-smuggling and trafficking networks in Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. 

    The task force has since expanded to cover operations in Panama, Colombia, and now northern and maritime U.S. borders.

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    JTFA has been credited with over 300 arrests, over 240 convictions, and more than 170 sentencing outcomes, while seizing millions in illicit profits, vehicles, weapons, and property from smuggling organizations.

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  • 2 firefighters battling Washington state wildfire arrested by Border Patrol

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    SEATTLE — Two firefighters who were part of a 44-person crew fighting a wildland blaze on Washington state’s Olympic Peninsula were taken into custody by U.S. Border Patrol agents during a multiagency criminal investigation into the two contractors they worked for, federal authorities said Thursday.

    The U.S. Bureau of Land Management asked the Border Patrol to help check the workers’ identities Wednesday when crews were working in a remote area, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Border Patrol said in a statement. Border Patrol agents found two workers who were in the U.S. illegally and detained them, the agencies said.

    Federal authorities did not provide information about the investigation into the contractors, and they did not immediately respond to questions seeking details about the criminal case.

    The BLM terminated the contracts with Table Rock Forestry Inc. and ASI Arden Solutions Inc. — both from Oregon — and escorted the 42 workers off federal land, the release said. The two arrested were taken to the Bellingham station on charges of illegal entry and reentry, authorities said.

    Email and phone messages left Thursday for the two businesses seeking comment were not immediately returned.

    Initial reports saying firefighters had been arrested by federal agents sparked outrage from U.S. Sen. Patty Murray. Several firefighters who witnessed the incident had told The Seattle Times anonymously that federal agents took two firefighters into custody.

    Murray responded to the news on Thursday by saying the Trump administration has undercut wildland firefighting by “decimating the Forest Service” and their immigration policy “is fundamentally sick.”

    “Here in the Pacific Northwest, wildfires can, and have, burned entire towns to the ground,” the Democrat said in a statement. “This new Republican policy to detain firefighters on the job is as immoral as it is dangerous.”

    Dennis Lawson, president of the Washington State Council of Fire Fighters, told the AP that firefighters work as a team, and losing a member for any reason hurts their ability to serve their communities.

    U.S. Border Patrol Blaine Sector Chief Patrol Agent Rosario Vasquez said in the statement that the effort highlights the coordination between federal agencies to ensure the integrity of government operations.

    “U.S. Border Patrol steadfastly enforces the laws of the United States and unapologetically addresses violations of immigration law wherever they are encountered,” Vasquez said.

    The crews were helping with the Bear Gulch Fire, which has burned about 14 square miles (36 square kilometers) on the north side of Lake Cushman in the Olympic National Forest and National Park. It was 13% contained by Thursday afternoon.

    Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden posted on the social media site X that one of the arrested firefighters was from Oregon and denounced the arrest, saying it makes communities less safe. The man is represented by lawyers with the nonprofit Innovation Law Lab, who said he was unlawfully detained and they have been unable to locate him.

    “We demand that they allow him to access counsel as is his right afforded by the U.S. Constitution,” lawyer Rodrigo Fernandez-Ortega said in an email. “We have seen entire towns burned to the ground and it is outrageous that the US border patrol unlawfully detained the brave individuals who are protecting us.”

    Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson said he was “deeply concerned” about the news, adding that firefighters help keep communities safe. He said his team has reached out to the federal agencies to get more information and “to question why the Trump administration’s cruel immigration policies now extend to individuals fighting forest fires.”

    Jennifer Risdal, a spokesperson for the U.S. Forest Service’s Incident Management Team overseeing the firefighting efforts, said they were aware of the Border Patrol activities at the fire site but offered no information about what happened.

    “The Border Patrol operation is not interfering with firefighting activity and Bear Gulch firefighters continue to make progress on the fire,” Risdal told The Associated Press in an email.

    During the first Trump administration, DHS issued a statement during the 2020 wildfire season saying CBP and Immigration and Customs Enforcement were concerned about the impact the fires could have on Western states and said their highest priority was “the preservation of life and safety.”

    “In consideration of these circumstances, there will be no immigration enforcement initiatives associated with evacuations or sheltering related to the wildfires, except in the event of a serious public safety threat,” the statement said.

    Commissioner of Public Lands Dave Upthegrove, whose agency oversees Washington’s wildland firefighting efforts, said he was aware of the enforcement actions at the Bear Gulch Fire.

    “While we don’t have all of the details yet, this is all occurring at a time when the Trump administration’s crude and inhumane approach to immigration enforcement has intentionally and unnecessarily stoked fear and mistrust among members of the public — including firefighters putting their lives on the line to protect our state,” he said.

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  • License plate camera company halts cooperation with federal agencies

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    SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — One of the nation’s leading operators of automated license-plate reading systems announced Monday it has paused its operations with federal agencies because of confusion and concern — including in Illinois — about the purpose of their investigations.

    Flock Safety, whose cameras are mounted in more than 4,000 communities nationwide, put a hold last week on pilot programs with the Department of Homeland Security’s Customs and Border Protection and its law enforcement arm, Homeland Security Investigations, according to a statement by its founder and CEO, Garrett Langley.

    Among officials in other jurisdictions, Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias raised concerns. He announced Monday that an audit found Customs and Border Protection had accessed Illinois data, although he didn’t say that the agency was seeking immigration-related information. A 2023 law the Democrat pushed bars sharing license plate data with police investigating out-of-state abortions or undocumented immigrants.

    “This sharing of license plate data of motorists who drive on Illinois roads is a clear violation of the state law,” Giannoulias said in a statement. “This law, passed two years ago, aimed to strengthen how data is shared and prevent this exact thing from happening,”

    Flock Safety’s cameras capture billions of photos of license plates each month. However, it doesn’t own that data. The local agencies in whose jurisdictions the cameras are located do, and they’re the ones who receive inquiries from other law enforcement agencies.

    Langley said the company had initiated pilot programs with Customs and Border Protection and Homeland Security Investigations to help combat human trafficking and fentanyl distribution. The company is unaware of any immigration-related searches the agencies made, but Langley said parameters were unclear.

    “We clearly communicated poorly. We also didn’t create distinct permissions and protocols in the Flock system to ensure local compliance for federal agency users,” Langley said.

    The revelation comes two months after Giannoulias announced that police in the Chicago suburb of Mount Prospect had shared data with a Texas sheriff who was seeking a missing woman. The woman’s family was worried because she had undergone a self-administered abortion.

    Although the sheriff in Johnson County, Texas, said he was simply trying to help the family locate the woman, Giannoulias demanded more vigilance from Flock Safety because of the abortion connection.

    In addition to halting the pilot programs, Flock has tweaked its system so that federal inquiries are clearly identified as such. And federal agencies will no longer be able to make blanket national or even statewide searches, but only one-on-one searches with particular police agencies.

    Asked when the federal agency had accessed Illinois data, a Giannoulias spokesperson said the investigation was ongoing.

    After the June incident, Flock Safety responded to Giannoulias’ request that its system reject searches that includes terms such as “abortion,” “immigration” or “ICE” (for Immigration and Customs Enforcement). Those flag terms have been in effect since late June, a Flock Safety spokesperson said.

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  • Fact-checking Trump’s most repeated immigration inaccuracies

    Fact-checking Trump’s most repeated immigration inaccuracies

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    Millions of immigrants are coming to the U.S. from foreign prisons and mental institutions. Immigrants are raising U.S. crime rates. Immigrants are ruining Social Security. Noncitizens are illegally voting in federal elections. Immigrants are taking U.S. jobs. 

    That is just a sampling of the false and misleading immigration claims former President Donald Trump has repeated during his 2024 presidential run.

    Similar to his 2016 and 2020 campaigns, in this campaign Trump has stoked voters’ fears using immigrants as a scapegoat for what he considers to be the problems facing the U.S. And as in the past, his statements about immigration have been rife with misinformation.

    Here are the facts behind eleven of his most repeated immigration falsehoods.

    Falsehoods about migrants coming in from foreign prison and mental institutions

    Foreign countries sending criminals to the U.S.: Trump has repeatedly claimed that countries are “emptying out their prisons and jails” and sending millions of people to illegally migrate to the U.S. That’s Pants on Fire! There is no evidence this is happening. 

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    Trump incorrectly cited a drop in Venezuela’s crime rate as evidence of this phenomenon. Although Venezuelan government data is unreliable, some data from independent organizations shows that violent deaths in that country have recently decreased. Criminologists attribute this decline to Venezuela’s poor economy and the government’s extrajudicial killings, not the government emptying its prisons and sending criminals to the United States.

    Trump has also fixated on the Democratic Republic of Congo when he repeats the claim. Not only is there no evidence that the Democratic Republic of Congo’s government is emptying its prisons or mental institutions, but U.S. immigration officials’ border encounters with Congolese people are minimal. They represent less than 0.03% of total encounters from fiscal year 2021 through June 2024

    Falsehoods about migrants disadvantaging U.S. citizens, taking benefits

    Diverting hurricane relief to immigrants: Following Hurricanes Helene and Milton, Trump made the Pants on Fire! claim that the Federal Emergency Management Agency is taking disaster relief money to spend on immigrants in the U.S. illegally. But FEMA migrant funding does not come at disaster relief’s expense. Neither of FEMA’s two programs for migrants uses money from the agency’s Disaster Relief Fund. In fact, during his administration, Trump shifted FEMA funding — including money from the Disaster Relief Fund — to address immigration. 

    Immigrants in the U.S. illegally are hurting Social Security: Trump has falsely said that immigration is hurting Social Security. The key threat to Social Security’s long-term viability is a shortage of workers feeding their tax dollars into the system, alongside a growing number of retirement-age Americans qualifying to receive benefits. Immigrants in the U.S. illegally are ineligible to receive Social Security retirement benefits, but estimates have found they pay billions of dollars in Social Security taxes annually. This helps — not harms — the program’s solvency.

    Falsehoods about noncitizen voting

    Democrats are bringing migrants to the U.S. as voters: In January, Trump said Democrats are letting migrants into the U.S. and signing them up to vote in federal elections. That’s Pants on Fire! There is no evidence for this scheme. Only U.S. citizens can vote in federal elections, and proven incidents of noncitizens casting ballots are rare. It can take years for newly arrived immigrants who are eligible to be granted asylum or other permanent legal status, and then it takes more years for them to be eligible to apply for citizenship.

    Falsehoods about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio

    Immigrants from Haiti are eating pets or geese: Trump amplified this false narrative that we rated Pants on Fire! Local officials say there is no evidence that is happening. Despite the fact-checks, Trump has doubled down, saying he is repeating what has been “reported.” Local and national news outlets have debunked the baseless narrative.

    There are 30,000 immigrants in Springfield, Ohio and they are here illegally: Speaking about Springfield, Ohio, Trump has incorrectly said “30,000 illegal migrants were put into a town of 50,000 people.” Springfield had 58,000 people in the 2020 census. City officials have said 12,000 to 20,000 new migrants arrived in Springfield over the last four years. Most of the immigrants are Haitians and are allowed to temporarily live and work in the country legally.

    Trump is also wrong to say the immigrants were “placed” in the small midwestern city. After entering the U.S., immigrants choose where they move.

    Falsehoods about immigration data

    325,000 children are “missing”: Trump has misleadingly said “325,000 children are missing, dead, sex slaves, or slaves.” This is a distortion of federal data about migrant children. An August federal oversight report about children arriving at the southwest border alone and released from federal government custody said that as of May, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had not served a “Notice to Appear” to more than 291,000 children. (A Notice to Appear is a charging document authorities issue and file in immigration court to start removal proceedings.)

    The report said that unaccompanied children “who do not appear for court are considered at higher risk for trafficking, exploitation, or forced labor.” The report doesn’t state how many children have been trafficked, nor does it say they’re missing or dead.

    Harris has released thousands of criminals into the U.S.: Trump has said Harris “let in 13,099 convicted murderers.” That’s False and misconstrues Immigration and Customs Enforcement data. There are 13,000 noncitizens convicted of homicide in the U.S. who are not in immigration detention.  But the data represents people who entered the country in the past 40 years; there is no evidence they all entered under the Biden-Harris administration. And many people are not in immigration detention because they’re in law enforcement custody serving sentences. 

    21 million immigrants have illegally crossed the border under the Biden-Harris administration: Trump has repeatedly said 21 million people have crossed the U.S. border in the past three and a half years. That’s False. Immigration officials have encountered immigrants illegally crossing the U.S. border around 10.4 million times since January 2021. When accounting for Congressional Republicans’ “got aways” estimate — people who border officials don’t stop — the number rises to about 12.4 million. 

    But encounters aren’t the same as admissions. Encounters represent events, so one person who tries to cross the border twice counts as two encounters. Also, not everyone encountered is let into the country. The Department of Homeland Security estimates about 4.2 million encounters have led to expulsions or removals from January 2021 through June 2024.

    Falsehoods about Harris

    Harris said she wanted to abolish ICE: Trump has falsely said that Harris wants to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement. As a U.S. senator in 2018, Harris criticized the Trump administration’s immigration policies, including one that led to family separations at the border. In that context, Harris said Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s function should be reexamined and that “we need to probably even think about starting from scratch.” But she didn’t say there shouldn’t be immigration enforcement. In 2018, Harris also said Immigration and Customs Enforcement had a role and should exist.

    Biden named Harris ‘border czar’ and put her in charge of border security: Trump has misrepresented Harris’ immigration role in the Biden administration. Biden did not name Harris “border czar.”  In March 2021, Biden tasked Harris to work with officials in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras to address the issues driving people to leave those countries and come to the United States. The Biden-Harris administration said it would focus on five key issues: economic insecurity, corruption, human rights, criminal gang violence and gender-based violence. Biden did not task Harris with controlling who and how many people enter the southern U.S. border. That’s the Homeland Security secretary’s responsibility.

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  • FACT FOCUS: A look at false and misleading claims made during Trump and Harris’ debate

    FACT FOCUS: A look at false and misleading claims made during Trump and Harris’ debate

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    In their first and perhaps only debate, former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris described the state of the country in distinctly different ways. As the two traded jabs, some old false and misleading claims emerged along with some new ones.

    Here’s a look.

    Trump overstates his economic record

    TRUMP: “I created one of the greatest economies in the history of our country. … They’ve destroyed the economy.”

    THE FACTS: This is an exaggeration. The economy grew much faster under Presidents Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan than it did under Trump. The broadest measure of economic growth, gross domestic product, rose 4% a year for four straight years under Clinton. The fastest growth under Trump was 3% in 2018. The economy shrank 2.2% in 2020, at the end of Trump’s presidency. And a higher proportion of American adults had jobs under Clinton than under Trump. During the Biden-Harris administration, the economy expanded 5.8% in 2021, though much of that reflected a bounce-back from COVID.

    Trump’s record on manufacturing jobs examined

    HARRIS: “We have created over 800,000 manufacturing jobs. … Donald Trump said he was going to create manufacturing jobs. He lost manufacturing jobs.”

    THE FACTS: Those statements are missing context.

    There were 12,188,000 manufacturing employees in the U.S. when Biden took office in January 2021, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Preliminary numbers for August 2024 put that number at 12,927,000. That’s a difference of 739,000 — close to the 800,000 number Harris has cited.

    Also of note is the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. The number of manufacturing employees dropped steeply in April 2020, by more than 1.3 million. Discounting that decline, there were only 206,000 more manufacturing employees in August than there were in March 2020, prior to the pandemic.

    Inflation has gone down

    TRUMP: “They had the highest inflation perhaps in the history of our country, because I’ve never seen a worse period of time.”

    THE FACTS: While praising the strength of the economy under his presidency, Donald Trump misstated the inflation rate under Biden. Inflation peaked at 9.1% in June 2022 after rising steadily in the first 17 months of Biden’s presidency from a low of 0.1% in May 2020. It’s now seeing a downward trend. The most recent data shows that as of July it had fallen to 2.9%. Other historical periods have seen higher inflation, which hit more than 14% in 1980, according to the Federal Reserve.

    Trump has distanced himself from Project 2025

    HARRIS: “What you’re going to hear tonight is a detailed and dangerous plan called Project 2025 that the former president intends on implementing if he were elected again.”

    What to know about the 2024 Election

    THE FACTS: Trump has said he doesn’t know about Project 2025, a controversial blueprint for another Republican presidential administration.

    The plan was written up by many of his former aides and allies, but Trump has never said he’ll implement the roughly 900-page guide if he’s elected again. He has said it’s not related to his campaign.

    Trump on abortions ‘after birth’

    TRUMP: “Her vice presidential pick says abortion in the ninth month is absolutely fine. He also says execution after birth, it’s execution, no longer abortion, because the baby is born, is okay.”

    THE FACTS: Walz has said no such thing. Infanticide is criminalized in every state, and no state has passed a law that allows killing a baby after birth.

    Abortion rights advocates say terms like “late-term abortions” attempt to stigmatize abortions later in pregnancy. Abortions later in pregnancy are exceedingly rare. In 2020, less than 1% of abortions in the United States were performed at or after 21 weeks, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

    Trump’s taxing and spending plan examined

    HARRIS: “What the Wharton School has said is Donald Trump’s plan would actually explode the deficit.”

    THE TRUTH: The Penn-Wharton Budget Model did find that Trump’s tax and spending plans would significantly expand the deficit by $5.8 trillion over ten years. But it also found that Harris’ plans would increase the deficit by $1.2 trillion over the same period.

    Harris’ record on fracking examined

    TRUMP: “If she won the election, fracking in Pennsylvania will end on Day 1.”

    THE FACTS: Trump’s statement ignores the fact that without a law approved by Congress, a president can only ban fracking on federal lands.

    The federal government owns about 2% of Pennsylvania’s total land, and it is not clear how much of that is suitable for oil or gas drilling.

    Republicans have criticized Harris for “flip-flopping” on the issue, noting that Harris said in the 2020 campaign that she opposed fracking, a drilling technique that is widely used in Pennsylvania and other states.

    Harris has since said repeatedly that she won’t ban fracking if elected, and she reiterated that in Tuesday’s debate.

    Trump shares inflated numbers around migrants and crime

    TRUMP: “When you look at these millions and millions of people that are pouring into our country monthly — whereas, I believe, 21 million people, not the 15 people say, and I think it’s a lot higher than the 21 — that’s bigger than New York State … and just look at what they’re doing to our country. They’re criminals, many of these people are criminals, and that’s bad for our economy too.”

    FACTS: Trump’s figures are wildly inflated. The Border Patrol made 56,408 arrests of people crossing the border illegally from Mexico in July, the latest monthly figure available. Since Biden took office, the Border Patrol made about 7.1 million border arrests, though the number of people is considerably lower because many of those arrests were repeat crossers.

    The Biden administration also permitted legal entry for about 765,000 people on an online app called CBP One at land crossings in Mexico through July. It allowed another 520,000 from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela to come by air with financial sponsors. Additionally, an unknown number of people crossed the border illegally and eluded capture.

    That doesn’t come close to “millions and millions of people” monthly. …. It is also unproven that “many of these people are criminals.”

    There have been high-profile, heinous crimes committed by immigrants. But FBI statistics do not separate out crimes by the immigration status of the assailant, nor is there any evidence of a spike in crime perpetrated by migrants. In 1931, the Wickersham Commission did not find any evidence supporting a connection between immigration and increased crime, and many studies since then have reached similar conclusions.

    Trump repeats false claims that noncitizens are being sought to vote

    TRUMP: “A lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote. They can’t even speak English. They don’t even know what country they’re in practically and these people are trying to get them to vote, and that’s why they’re allowing them to come into our country.”

    THE FACTS: In recent months, Trump and other Republicans have been repeating the baseless claim that Democrats want migrants to come into the country illegally so they will vote.

    There’s no evidence for this, nor is there any evidence that noncitizens illegally vote in significant numbers in this country.

    Voting by people who are not U.S. citizens already is illegal in federal elections. It can be punishable by fines, prison time and even deportation. While noncitizens have cast ballots, studies show it’s incredibly rare, and states regularly audit their voter lists to remove ineligible voters from the rolls.

    Trump’s comments suggest that not speaking English is somehow prohibitive for voting in the U.S. — and that’s also not the case. In fact, the Voting Rights Act requires certain states to provide election materials in other languages depending on the voting-age population’s needs.

    Trump misrepresents crime statistics

    TRUMP, criticizing the Biden administration: “Crime is through the roof.”

    THE FACTS: In fact, FBI data has shown a downward trend in violent crime since a coronavirus pandemic spike. Violent crime surged during the pandemic, with homicides increasing nearly 30% in 2020 over the previous year — the largest one-year jump since the FBI began keeping records

    Violent crime was down 6% in the last three months of 2023 compared with the same period the year before, according to FBI data released in March. Murders were down 13%. New FBI statistics released in June show the overall violent crime rate declined 15% in the first three months of 2024 compared to the same period last year. One expert has cautioned, however, that those 2024 figures are preliminary and may overstate the actual reduction in crime.

    Trump endorses false rumor about immigrants eating pets

    TRUMP: “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats… They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”

    THE FACTS: There’s no evidence to support the claim, which Trump and his campaign have used to argue immigrants are committing crimes at a higher rate than others.

    Authorities in Ohio have said there are no credible or detailed reports to support Trump’s claim.

    Jobs created under the Biden administration

    “TRUMP: “Just like their number of 818,000 jobs that they said they created turned out to be a fraud.”

    THE FACTS: This is a mischaracterization of the government’s process of counting jobs. Every year the Labor Department issues a revision of the number of jobs added in a 12-month period from April through March in the previous year. The adjustment is made because the government’s initial job counts are based on surveys of businesses. The revision is then based on actual job counts from unemployment insurance files that are compiled later. The revision is compiled by career government employees with little involvement by politically appointed officials.

    National Guard soldiers on Jan. 6

    TRUMP, speaking about the Jan. 6 insurrection: “I said I’d like to give you 10,000 National Guard or soldiers. They rejected me. Nancy Pelosi rejected me.”

    THE FACTS: That’s false. Pelosi does not direct the National Guard.

    Further, as the Capitol came under attack, she and then-Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell called for military assistance, including from the National Guard.

    The Capitol Police Board makes the decision on whether to call National Guard troops to the Capitol. It is made up of the House Sergeant at Arms, the Senate Sergeant at Arms and the Architect of the Capitol.

    The board decided not to call the guard ahead of the insurrection but did eventually request assistance after the rioting had already begun, and the troops arrived several hours later.

    There is no evidence that either Pelosi or McConnell directed the security officials not to call the guard beforehand.

    Trump falsely claims China is building ‘massive’ auto plants in Mexico

    TRUMP: “They’re building big auto plants in Mexico, in many cases owned by China.”

    THE FACTS: It’s not the first time Trump has claimed the Biden administration is allowing Chinese automakers to build factories just across the border in Mexico.

    At present, though, industry experts say they know of no such plants under construction, and there’s only one small Chinese auto assembly factory operating in Mexico. It’s run by a company called JAC that builds inexpensive vehicles from kits for sale in that country.

    Trump falsely claims evidence shows he won in 2020

    TRUMP: “There’s so much proof. All you have to do is look at it.”

    THE FACTS: The election was not stolen. The authorities who have reviewed the election — including Trump’s own attorney general — have concluded the election was fair.

    Biden’s victory over Trump in 2020 was not particularly close. He won the Electoral College with 306 votes to Trump’s 232, and the popular vote by more than 7 million ballots. Recounts in key states affirmed Biden’s victory, and lawsuits challenging the results were unsuccessful.

    Trump claims Putin endorsed Harris

    TRUMP: “Putin endorsed her last week, said ‘I hope she wins.’”

    THE FACTS: Russian President Vladimir Putin did wryly claim last week that Harris was his preferred candidate, but intelligence officials have dismissed the comment as not serious.

    U.S. intelligence agencies have said Russia favors Trump, who has openly praised Putin, suggested cutting funds to Ukraine and repeatedly criticized the NATO military alliance.

    Harris takes Trump’s ‘bloodbath’ comment out of context

    HARRIS: “Donald Trump, the candidate, has said in this election there will be a bloodbath if this and the outcome of this election is not to his liking. Let’s turn the page on that.”

    THE FACTS: Trump delivered the line at a speech in March in Ohio in which he was talking about the impact of offshoring on the American auto industry and his plans to increase tariffs on foreign-made cars. It was in reference to the auto industry that he warned of a “bloodbath” if his proposals aren’t enacted.

    “If I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole — that’s going to be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country,” Trump said.

    Trump inflates numbers around new military equipment left in Afghanistan

    TRUMP, on the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan: “We wouldn’t have left $85 billion worth of brand new, beautiful military equipment behind.”

    THE FACTS: That number is significantly inflated, according to reports from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, which oversees American taxpayer money spent on the conflict.

    The $85 billion figure resembles a number from a July 30 quarterly report from SIGAR, which outlined that the U.S. has invested about $83 billion to build, train and equip Afghan security forces since 2001. That funding included troop pay, training, operations and infrastructure along with equipment and transportation over two decades, according to SIGAR reports and Dan Grazier, a defense policy analyst at the Project on Government Oversight.

    Only about $18 billion of that sum went toward equipping Afghan forces between 2002 and 2018, a June 2019 SIGAR report showed.

    No one knows the exact value of the U.S.-supplied Afghan equipment the Taliban have secured, defense officials have confirmed it is significant.

    Trump misrepresents key facts of the Central Park Five case

    TRUMP: “They admitted, they said they pled guilty and I said, ’well, if they pled guilty they badly hurt a person, killed a person ultimately … And they pled guilty, then they pled not guilty.”

    THE FACTS: Trump misstated key details of the case while defending a newspaper ad he placed about two weeks after the April 1989 attack in which he called for bringing back the death penalty. Trump wrongly stated that the victim was killed and that the wrongly accused suspects had pleaded guilty.

    Trump appeared to be confusing guilty pleas with confessions that the men — teenagers at the time — said they made to police under duress. They later recanted, pleaded not guilty in court and were convicted after jury trials. Their convictions were vacated in 2002 after another person confessed to the crime.

    The victim, Trisha Meili, was in a coma for 12 days after the attack but ultimately survived. She testified in court against the wrongly accused suspects, who are now known as the Exonerated Five. In 2002, Matias Reyes confessed to the crime and said he was the lone assailant. DNA testing matched Reyes to the attack, but because of the statute of limitations he could not be charged in connection with it.

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    Associated Press writers Melissa Goldin, David Klepper, Ali Swenson, Matthew Daly, Chris Rugaber and Tom Krisher contributed to this story.

    ___

    Find AP Fact Checks here: https://apnews.com/APFactCheck.

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  • Norway is mulling building a fence on its border with Russia, following Finland’s example

    Norway is mulling building a fence on its border with Russia, following Finland’s example

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    HELSINKI — Norway may put a fence along part or all of the 198-kilometer (123-mile) border it shares with Russia, a minister said, a move inspired by a similar project in its Nordic neighbor Finland.

    “A border fence is very interesting, not only because it can act as a deterrent but also because it contains sensors and technology that allow you to detect if people are moving close to the border,” Justice Minister Emilie Enger Mehl said in an interview with the Norwegian public broadcaster NRK published late Saturday.

    She said the Norwegian government is currently looking at “several measures” to beef up security on the border with Russia in the Arctic north, such as fencing, increasing the number of border staff or stepping up monitoring.

    The Storskog border station, which has witnessed only a handful of illegal border crossing attempts in the past few years, is the only official crossing point into Norway from Russia.

    Should the security situation in the delicate Arctic area worsen, the Norwegian government is ready to close the border on short notice, said Enger Mehl, who visited neighboring Finland this summer to learn about how the entire 1,340-kilometer (830-mile) Finnish-Russian land border was closed.

    The Finnish government was prompted to close all crossing points from Russia to Finland in late 2023 after more than 1,300 third-country migrants without proper documentation or visas — an unusually high number — entered the country in three months, just months after the nation became a member of NATO.

    To prevent Moscow using migrants in what the Finnish government calls Russia’s “hybrid warfare,” Helsinki is currently building fences with a total length of up to 200 kilometers (124 miles) in separate sections along the border zone that makes up part of NATO’s northern flank and serves as the European Union’s external border.

    Finnish border officials say fences equipped with top-notch surveillance equipment — to be located mostly around crossing points — are needed to better monitor and control any migrants attempting to cross over from Russia and give officials time to react.

    Inspired by Finland’s project, Enger Mehl said that such a fence could also be a good idea for Norway. According to NRK, her statement was supported by police chief Ellen Katrine Hætta in Norway’s northern Finnmark county.

    “It’s a measure that may become relevant on all or part of the border” between Norway and Russia, Enger Mehl said.

    The Storskog border station is currently surrounded by a 200-meter (660-foot) -long and 3.5-meter (12-foot) -high fence erected in 2016 after some 5,000 migrants and asylum-seekers had crossed over from Russia to Norway a year earlier.

    Norway, a nation of 5.6 million, is a NATO member but isn’t part of the European Union. However, it belongs to the EU’s Schengen area, whose participants have abolished border controls at their mutual borders, guaranteeing free movement of citizens.

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  • Harris touts ‘border security and stability’ at Arizona campaign stop

    Harris touts ‘border security and stability’ at Arizona campaign stop

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    DOUGLAS, Ariz. — 

    Amid relentless criticism from former President Trump that she is responsible for out-of-control illegal immigration, Vice President Kamala Harris on Friday made her first visit to the U.S.-Mexico border since 2021, announcing more stringent measures she would take as president to restrict border entry.

    “The United States is a sovereign nation, and I believe we have a duty to set rules at our border, and to enforce them,” Harris told a crowd in Douglas, Ariz., gathered in a small auditorium at Cochise College Douglas Campus, where the stage was flanked by large signs that read, “Border security and stability.” “We are also a nation of immigrants. The United States has been enriched by generations of people who have come from every corner of the world to contribute to our country and to become part of the American story.”

    Harris said she would go beyond Biden administration policies to further restrict border access outside of official ports of entry.

    Earlier in the afternoon, Harris visited a port of entry less than 10 miles from the campaign event. Two Border Patrol agents walked with her along the towering fence, which was built during the Obama administration. Harris later told reporters that she had thanked them for their work.

    “They’ve got a tough job and they need, rightly, support to do their job. They are very dedicated,” she said. “And so I’m here to talk with them about what we can continue to do to support them.”

    She advocated for hiring more officers and adding more fentanyl detection systems at border entry points.

    “I reject the false choice that suggest we must either choose between securing our border or creating a system of immigration that is safe, orderly and humane,” Harris said. “We can and we must do both.”

    Immigration reform has bedeviled presidents of both parties for decades.

    A bipartisan proposal earlier this year that combined increased funding for border security and foreign aid for Ukraine appeared to be the first breakthrough until it was derailed when Trump urged Republicans to oppose it.

    Kamala Harris speaks at Cochise College Douglas Campus in Douglas, Ariz., on Friday.

    (Carolyn Kaster / Associated Press)

    That deal fell short of comprehensive plans discussed for decades that would revamp the asylum system and the legal immigration process and provide a pathway to citizenship for an estimated 11 million people in the country without legal authorization, including those who arrived as children. Harris on Friday mentioned farm workers and immigrants who arrived as children, known as “Dreamers.”

    “As president, I will put politics aside to fix our immigration system and find solutions to problems which have persisted for far too long,” Harris said.

    In advance of Harris’ visit to the border, Trump pointed to reports that there are more than 425,000 convicted criminals who are in the country illegally but not detained by federal authorities, according to data provided by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in response to a lawmaker’s request.

    That includes more than 13,000 convicted of homicide and more than 15,800 convicted of sexual assault, according to the ICE data shared on X, formerly Twitter, by Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas).

    Trump said Thursday that 21 million people entered the country illegally in just the last four years. He framed the bipartisan effort that he helped defeat as “her atrocious border bill.”

    “It was not a border bill. It was an amnesty bill … ,” he said at a news conference in Manhattan. “Fortunately Congress was too smart for it.”

    The bill would not have provided a path to citizenship for people who lack legal status.

    The GOP nominee’s appearance at Trump Tower was reminiscent of his 2015 campaign announcement there, notably his references to other nations purposefully sending criminals to the United States.

    His remarks included multiple falsehoods, such as saying Harris approved a raft of changes to the nation’s immigration policies that as vice president she had no control over, and that she was the Biden administration’s “border czar.” She had been charged with trying to improve conditions in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras to stop those nations’ residents from fleeing their homelands.

    That assignment has been a political headache for Harris — drawing criticism from the left and right.

    In a 2021 visit to Central America, Harris told would-be migrants that they would be deported if they crossed the border, angering allies of immigrants who said they were fleeing poverty, corruption and violence.

    “Do not come,” she said at the time. “You will be turned back.”

    On the same trip, Harris laughed off questions in a nationally televised interview about why she had not yet visited the border as vice president, inflaming critics on the right.

    Both political parties are hyper-focused on immigration because while the presidential race is very tight in the polling, Trump has a double-digit edge on the issue of border security. That edge has narrowed, however, since President Biden decided not to seek reelection and Harris garnered the support to become the Democratic presidential nominee.

    Border stops hit a record in December, with agents making nearly 250,000 arrests. As the political problem raged, Biden signed an order in June to heavily restrict asylum claims, prompting a sharp drop in border encounters, to fewer than 60,000 in July and August.

    Republicans have been hammering the issue, with GOP members of Congress filing a resolution that “strongly condemns the Biden Administration and its Border Czar, Kamala Harris’s, failure to secure the United States border” one day after the president announced he would not seek reelection.

    While some of the former president and his allies’ claims are demonstrably false and have been denounced by GOP elected officials, such as allegations that Haitian migrants are eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, concerns among some voters about the impact of an insecure border on the economy, crime and the fentanyl crisis are palpable in many communities.

    Friday’s visit was Harris’ second to Arizona since she became the Democratic presidential nominee, according to the Harris-Walz campaign. While Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff and others have swung through the southwestern battleground state, Harris has focused much of her in-person campaigning in critical states farther east, such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia.

    Hours before the vice president landed in Arizona, Republicans held a press call featuring two mothers whose daughters were raped and killed by immigrants who were in the country illegally and the mother of a teenage son who overdosed on fentanyl. The women lambasted Harris for the administration’s immigration policy and for visiting the border so close to the election.

    “I’m trying very hard not to cry. We live 1,800 miles away from the border,” said Patty Morin, the mother of Rachel Morin, a mother of five who was brutally attacked while walking a bucolic and well-traveled public trail in Maryland. Her body was discovered in a drain pipe.

    “No one is safe in America, no one is safe. If you have a sanctuary city in your state, you’re not safe,” she said. “They have bused, flown, trained illegal immigrants to literally every nook and cranny and every tiny town in the whole of the United States.”

    Such fears are among the reasons the Harris campaign released an ad about immigration in Arizona on Friday, and visited the Southern border less than a month and a half before election day. As vice president, she previously visited the region once in 2021, when she toured the port of entry and border operation in El Paso.

    Mehta reported from Phoenix and Pinho reported from Douglas. Times staff writers Noah Bierman and Andrea Castillo contributed to this report from Washington, D.C.

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    Seema Mehta, Faith E. Pinho

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  • Report: Uvalde school shooting response marred by breakdowns, poor training

    Report: Uvalde school shooting response marred by breakdowns, poor training

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    U.S. Border Patrol agents who rushed to the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas in 2022 failed to establish command and had inadequate training to confront what became one of the nation’s deadliest classroom attacks, according to a federal report released Thursday. But investigators concluded the agents did not violate rules and no disciplinary action was recommended.

    The roughly 200-page report from the Department of Homeland Security does not assign overarching blame for the hesitant police response at Robb Elementary School, where a teenage gunman with an AR-style rifle killed 19 students and two teachers inside a fourth-grade classroom. Nearly 200 U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers were involved in the response, more than any other law enforcement agency.

    The gunman was inside the classroom for more than 70 minutes before a tactical team, led by Border Patrol, went inside and killed the shooter.

    Much of the report — which the agency says was initiated to “provide transparency and accountability” — retells the chaos, confusion and numerous police missteps that other scathing government reports have already laid bare. Some victims’ family members bristled over federal investigators identifying no one deserving of discipline.

    “The failure of arriving law enforcement personnel to establish identifiable incident management or command and control protocols led to a disorganized response to the Robb Elementary School shooting,” the report stated. “No law enforcement official ever clearly established command at the school during the incident, leading to delays, inaction, and potentially further loss of life.”

    Customs and Border Protection said in a statement that investigators “concluded none of the CBP personnel operating at the scene were found to have violated any rule, regulation, or law, and no CBP personnel were referred for disciplinary action.”

    Families of the victims have long sought accountability for the slow law enforcement response.

    Jesse Rizo, whose niece Jacklyn Cazares was one of the students killed, said that while he hadn’t seen the report, he was briefed by family members who had and was disappointed to hear that it held no one accountable.

    “We’ve expected certain outcomes after these investigations, and it’s been letdown after letdown,” said Rizo, who is on the Uvalde school board.

    The report’s authors said its purpose was to determine if agents complied with relevant rules and laws, and if anything could improve their performance in the future.

    A Border Patrol agent who lined up behind other officers who breached the classroom described the scene as “mass confusion.”

    “He was surprised by the number of people who responded to the incident and was unsure about who was in charge,” the report states.

    Since the shooting, Border Patrol has largely not faced the same sharp criticism as Texas state troopers and local police over the failure to confront the shooter sooner. The gunman was inside the South Texas classroom for more than 70 minutes while a growing number of police, state troopers and federal agents remained outside in the hallways.

    Two Uvalde school police officers accused of failing to act were indicted this summer and have pleaded not guilty.

    Throughout the report, Border Patrol agents detail the confusion and lack of leadership that permeated the law enforcement response. Some agents commented that messages relayed via radio were at times incomprehensible because people talked over one other.

    A Border Patrol agent assigned to help at the Civic Center, where families gathered to await information about their children, called it “a chaotic mess with parents, media, and law enforcement,” the report said.

    Over 90 state police officials were at the scene, as well as school and city police. Multiple federal and state investigations have laid bare cascading problems in law enforcement training, communication, leadership and technology, and questioned whether officers prioritized their own lives over those of children and teachers.

    A report released by state lawmakers about two months after the shooting found “egregiously poor decision-making” by law enforcement. and among criticisms included in a U.S. Justice Department report released earlier this year was that there was “no urgency” in establishing a command center, creating confusion among police about who was in charge. That report highlighted problems in training, communication, leadership and technology that federal officials said contributed to the crisis lasting far longer than necessary.

    While terrified students and teachers called 911 from inside classrooms, dozens of officers stood in the hallway trying to figure out what to do. Desperate parents who had gathered outside the building pleaded with them to go in.

    A release last month by the city of a massive collection of audio and video recordings from that day included 911 calls from students inside the classroom. One student who survived can be heard begging for help in a series of 911 calls, whispering into the phone that there were “a lot” of bodies and telling the operator: “Please, I don’t want to die. My teacher is dead. Oh, my God.”

    The 18-year-old gunman entered the school at 11:33 a.m., first opening fire from the hallway, then going into two adjoining fourth-grade classrooms. The first responding officers arrived at the school minutes later. They approached the classrooms, but then retreated as the gunman opened fire.

    Finally, at 12:50 p.m., a group led by a Border Patrol tactical team entered one of the classrooms and fatally shot the gunman.

    Two of the responding officers now face criminal charges. Former Uvalde school Police Chief Pete Arredondo and former school officer Adrian Gonzales have pleaded not guilty to multiple charges of child abandonment and endangerment. A Texas state trooper in Uvalde who was suspended has been reinstated.

    Last week, Arredondo asked a judge to throw out the indictment. He has said he should not have been considered the incident commander and has been “scapegoated” into shouldering the blame for law enforcement failures that day.

    Uvalde police this week said a staff member was put on paid leave after the department finished an internal investigation into the discovery of additional video following the massive release last month of audio and video recordings.

    Victims’ families have filed a $500 million federal lawsuit against law enforcement who responded to the shooting.

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    By VALERIE GONZALEZ and JAMIE STENGLE – Associated Press

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  • Rich, western countries face a stark choice: 6-day workweeks or more immigration, top economist warns

    Rich, western countries face a stark choice: 6-day workweeks or more immigration, top economist warns

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    A specter is haunting Europe — the specter of aging.

    Many Western countries are facing what the World Bank calls a “profound demographic crisis”: The twin perils of an aging population and record-low fertility rates are predicted to send their populations plunging in the coming decades. 

    The worst consequences of this demographic shift, per the World Bank, are economic. Soon, the shrinking working population in the U.S., Canada, or Germany won’t be able to meet their own constant demands for high-quality goods and services. These rich, elderly countries will have to make a hard choice for economic survival: force people to work more, or allow immigrants to fill in? 

    Lant Pritchett, one of the world’s top thinkers on developmental economics, has seen this crisis coming for decades over his career at Harvard, the World Bank, and Oxford University, where he currently heads a research lab. He told Fortune his radical plan to stave off economic disaster. 

    Population decline

    In the long run, without intervention, the UN predicts that a decline in population growth could cascade into a full-on population “collapse.” That collapse is not likely to occur until well into the next century – if it comes at all. However, in the short run, population decline presents a real, and relatively simple economic problem: the West soon won’t have enough workers. 

    The ratio of working-age people to elderly people in rich countries will soon become so diminished that support for elders will be unaffordable. In Japan, a nation already facing the consequences of a graying population, the average cost of nursing care is projected to increase 75% in the next 30 years, with Prime Minister Fumio Kishida warning that the nation is on “the brink.” In the U.S., think tanks have warned, an older population with more retirees means a shrinking tax base and higher demands on programs like Social Security and Medicare, along with a smaller number of working-age people to pay into those programs. 

    In short, we have a “ticking time bomb” on our hands, in the words of Greece’s prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, whose government introduced a six-day workweek last month to address the nation’s labor shortages. The move prompted fury and protests among workers as they watched their German and Belgian cousins embrace four-day workweeks. 

    Indeed, even as some European countries and a few American companies flirt with working less, panicked economists and politicians are sounding the alarm: We need to work more. A study conducted by consulting firm Korn Ferry found that by 2030, there will be a global human talent shortage of more than 85 million people, roughly equivalent to the population of Germany. That talent shortage could slash $8.5 trillion from nations’ expected revenues, affecting highly educated sectors such as financial services and IT as well as manufacturing jobs, which are considered “lower skilled” and require less education.

    Now is the time to act, economic veteran Pritchett told Fortune. But doing so involves some radical rethinking of the current immigration debate. 

    Classical economics offers a number of ways to address a labor shortage, Prichett said. Since most of the unfilled jobs are “unskilled,” or don’t require a degree to complete, one solution for businesses and governments is to invest in automation, essentially having robots fill the gap. But, while automation helps get the jobs done, it depresses human workers’ wages by decreasing the amount of jobs available, “exacerbating” the issue, Pritchett said. 

    Some have called for increasing wages to induce more people to work. But most of the working-age population in the U.S. is already employed. Despite a well-documented decline in the portion of working-age men with jobs over the past few decades, Prichett said that the vast majority of working-age men are working, meaning raising pay would have small effects at best. There’s room for more women to work, he noted, but that could take away from other important responsibilities that are overwhelmingly shunted to women, such as caring for family or raising children. 

    That leaves two other options: forcing workers to work more or allowing an influx of legal, controlled immigration. 

    Why a six-day week won’t work

    Mitsotakis’ plan for a six-day-work week is a step in the right direction for the short term, Pritchett said. 

    But “economics is not just about direction: It’s about magnitude,” he added. In other words, he says, small policy tweaks won’t do it. If we’re trying to address a big, structural problem with the U.S. labor force, the solution needs to be ambitious and comprehensive—precisely the type of legislation American politicians have largely avoided in recent years.  

    If policymakers simply try to make everyone work an additional day, the math simply won’t work out in the long run, Pritchett said. Even if Greece has “fantastic success” and increases its working hours by 10% over the next 30 years, that growth would represent a “drop in the bucket” in fighting a worsening labor shortage. He calculated a demographic labor force gap of 232 million people globally in his most recent paper, even assuming the highest possible labor force participation rate. 

    “You can’t solve a problem that’s growing over time with [a labor force] that has an upward bound,” he said. You would have to keep the labor force working more and more, and even then, you would never be able to fill in the gap. 

    Pritchett has a better idea. He knows that the current immigration debate is fraught, since the West is concerned with the social ramifications of allowing more migrants into its borders. But he maintains the only way to solve rich countries’ labor problem is to let in immigrants to work, particularly from countries where population growth is increasing, such as Nigeria or Tanzania, rather than decreasing. 

    In his view, the Western debate on immigration has taken on an unnecessarily binary flavor, with the choice depicted as one between a path to citizenship or closed borders. In a recent article titled “The political acceptability of time-limited labor mobility,” Pritchett says the West will soon have to abandon this view. Instead, he advocates for developed nations to embrace a system where immigrants can come to their country to work for a limited time – while also buying goods and services, renting homes, starting companies, and hiring workers — and then go back home, leaving both parties wealthier.  

    Over his time at Harvard, Oxford, and the World Bank, Lant Pritchett came up with a plan to stave off economic decline.

    Courtesy of Lant Pritchett

    The future of immigration is temporary

    The truth, Pritchett said, is that the U.S. needs low-skilled migrants, and many migrants need the economic boost from working in the U.S. Immigration is a symbiotic relationship that the West cannot quit – that’s why it’s so hard for us to actually control our borders. 

    “The way to secure the border is to create a legitimate way for people and firms to get the labor that the economy really needs in legitimate, legal ways, and until we have that, the whole debate over the wall and stuff is just silly,” Pritchett said. 

    If anything, the intensifying crackdown on undocumented and legal migration since the late 1980s has led to mass settlement, according to Hein de Haas, a sociologist of immigration. Prior to the 1980s, the U.S. and Mexico enjoyed a relationship similar to the work-visa program Pritchett envisions. Mexicans freely flowed across the border, coming for a short time to work, returning home to enjoy their money, and sometimes repeating this journey over several years, Haas wrote. They never permanently settled because, knowing they could come and go as they pleased, they did not have to. 

    The U.S. facilitated this temporary migration programs specifically aimed at Mexicans,  encouraging contract workers to come to the U.S. after  World War I and II. The second of these,the Bracero Program, established a treaty for the temporary employment of Mexican farmworkers in the U.S., and was so popular that it was extended far beyond its initial lifespan, allowing nearly 5 million Mexicans to temporarily work in the U.S. from 1942 to 1964. (The program ended in 1965, when the U.S. sharply limited immigration from Latin America as part of a major overhaul of immigration laws.) 

    What Pritchett suggests isn’t too dissimilar from simply turning the clock back to a time when migrants could move and work freely. He proposes a fixed-term system: a worker comes to the U.S. with the understanding that they are not on a path to citizenship, works on a 3-year contract, and then returns to their home country. After an “off period” of six months to a year, the migrant could come back for another three years. 

    “There are a billion people on the planet who would come to the U.S. under those terms,” Pritchett said. “But we don’t have that available.” 

    He isn’t exaggerating about the billion. In a 2010 survey, Gallup asked people around the world whether they would like to temporarily move to work in another country. Some 1.1 billion responded “yes,” including 41% of the 15-to-24 population and 28% of those aged 25-44, Pritchett sa

    “What you could make in America in three years and go back to Senegal with is a fortune compared to anything else you could do to make your way in Senegal,” he added.  “You go back to Senegal, you build a house, you buy your own business, and you’ve transformed your life by working temporarily.” 

     To avoid potential labor shortages in sending nations, Pritchett’s system would depend on bilateral agreements between the host and sending countries, and nations “could choose to put limits on their participation” to address their own labor needs, Pritchett said. 

    Meanwhile, the U.S. would receive fresh batches of workers for service industries, elderly care, or manufacturing—essentially, all the jobs that would be otherwise unfilled. 

    Policies like these are not yet being discussed on the national stage, but Pritchett believes that will soon change. With the upcoming labor shortage and the unpopularity of forcing workers to toil for longer, politicians will have to expand their understanding of immigration to allow for policies like his. For now, he’s planting the seed. 

    In partnership with economist Rebekah Smith, Pritchett has started an organization called Labor Mobility Partnerships (LaMP) that aims to build political support for a temporary rotational migration system. The way he sees it, nothing will change by pitching the idea to politicians (“who tend to be followers, not leaders”) so instead, he is working with countries that are currently already expanding their immigration channels, like Spain. 

    He is also courting business leaders in sectors that will be the hardest hit by labor shortages, such as elderly care, who could “be potentially a powerful force” in explaining to politicians why policies like his are necessary. 

    “Ideas at times are like dams: huge, unmoving, impregnable, able to hold the water back forever,” Pritchett writes in the conclusion of his paper. “But a small, strategically placed crack can cause a dam to be washed away overnight.”

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    Eva Roytburg

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  • Did DHS’ Mayorkas tell agents not to detain criminals?

    Did DHS’ Mayorkas tell agents not to detain criminals?

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    President Joe Biden has said that to decrease illegal immigration — which has reached historic highs under his administration — he needs more money to hire more border officials.

    But in a June 30 “Fox News Sunday” interview, Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, said funding isn’t the problem, Biden’s policies are.

    “Because throwing money at this problem is not gonna fix it. It’s a policy change that needs to be effectuated,” McCaul said, advocating for a Trump-era policy that required some asylum seekers to wait in Mexico for U.S. immigration court proceedings. Biden revoked that policy.

    McCaul added: Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro “Mayorkas said: ‘Hey you don’t have to detain aggravated felons.’ Those are rapists, child predators, murderers. This is a reckless policy.”

    Other Republicans, including Rep. Mark Green of Tennessee, who chairs the House Committee on Homeland Security, have made statements similar to McCaul’s.

    To back the claim that Mayorkas is exempting murders, rapists and child predators from immigration enforcement, McCaul’s spokesperson pointed PolitiFact to a September 2021 memo Mayorkas issued. It said people who threaten public safety should be prioritized for detention and removal. But a criminal conviction alone shouldn’t determine whether someone is a threat and each case should be considered individually, the memo said.

    Republicans cited this memo in their articles of impeachment against Mayorkas, saying it defied immigration law. The House impeached Mayorkas in February in a 214-213 vote. The Senate later dismissed the impeachment articles.

    Although that memo didn’t specifically say “aggravated felons” should be prioritized for detention and deportation, its guidance — to prioritize enforcement against people with serious criminal conduct — meant that immigration officials could still remove them from the U.S., experts said.

    DHS said people who threaten public safety should be prioritized for immigration enforcement

    Federal law generally requires that people who enter the U.S. illegally be detained as they await immigration court proceedings. But because detention space is limited, some people are allowed into the country and told to attend immigration court proceedings later. People who cross the border illegally and have a criminal conviction in their country of origin are usually detained by U.S. immigration authorities.

    The Department of Homeland Security also issues guidance memos for immigration officials, outlining the categories of people that should be prioritized for detention and deportation.

    During Biden’s first days in office in January 2021, DHS explicitly said people who pose a public safety risk, including those convicted of an “aggravated felony,” are a top enforcement priority. Rape and murder, the crimes McCaul listed, are aggravated felonies. (Immigration law also says people convicted of these crimes must be detained and deported.)

    But federal courts banned the memo’s enforcement, saying the administration violated administrative procedure in implementing the memo. (The memo also paused deportations of nonprioritized people for 100 days.)

    So, in September 2021, DHS issued a new memo. (Texas and Louisiana challenged this memo’s guidance in court, but DHS reinstated it in 2023 after a Supreme Court decision said the states did not have standing.)

    The memo didn’t explicitly list as a detention and deportation priority people convicted of “aggravated felony.” But immigration experts told PolitiFact that rapists and murderers would still be prioritized for detention and deportation under this new memo.

    The memo said “a noncitizen who poses a threat to public safety, typically because of serious criminal conduct, is a priority for apprehension and removal,” and gave officials the discretion to detain and deport accordingly. 

    Whether someone poses a threat to public safety “is not to be determined according to bright lines or categories,” the memo said. Instead, agents should consider other factors such as the crime’s gravity, the harm caused and the person’s criminal record, DHS instructed.

    Aggravated felonies include many offenses, including tax evasion, which may not threaten public safety, said Rick Su, immigration law professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

    That’s partly why the Biden administration may not have specified aggravated felonies in the memo and have told its immigration officers to use their judgment when deciding whether a person’s conviction merits detention and deportation priority, Su said.

    Based on the memo, officers weigh “very serious criminal convictions that would make someone be a threat to public safety, as opposed to perhaps the less, though still criminal convictions like a theft crime,” said Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, associate policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.

    Although some people with aggravated felony convictions may be released because of “limited bed space, humanitarian factors, or a removal order which is impossible to execute, there is no evidence at all that DHS has a policy to decline to detain individuals with serious criminal convictions,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy director at the American Immigration Council, an immigrants rights advocacy group.

    People with criminal convictions, including aggravated felonies, have been detained and deported under Biden. More than 23,000 people convicted of aggravated felonies have been deported from the U.S. from October 2021 to February 2024, available DHS data shows.

    Our ruling

    McCaul said, “Mayorkas said, ‘Hey you don’t have to detain aggravated felons,’ those are rapists, child predators, you know, murderers.”

    A DHS memo didn’t explicitly say “aggravated felons” were prioritized for detention. Instead it said people who threaten public safety because of “serious criminal conduct” should be prioritized for detention and removal. The memo gave officials discretion to consider factors beyond a persons’ criminal conduct when determining whether they should be prioritized for detention and deportation. 

    But immigration experts said people convicted of murder and rape — aggravated felonies — would be a priority for detention because that serious criminal conduct would threaten public safety. Federal data also shows that people convicted of aggravated felonies have been detained and deported under Biden. The list of aggravated felonies under immigration law includes many other crimes beyond the ones McCaul listed, such as theft and tax evasion.

    McCaul’s statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. We rate it Mostly False.
     

    RELATED: Rubio overstates effect of Biden immigration actions, falsely claims he’s not detaining migrants

    RELATED: Donald Trump is wrong. Joe Biden doesn’t have an ‘immunity from deportation’ policy.

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  • Juneau GOP claim planes full of refugees arriving

    Juneau GOP claim planes full of refugees arriving

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    What’s more, the Facebook post misunderstands the meaning of the word refugee and the process by which refugees are allowed to enter the United States. In short, there is basically nothing right about the claim, and everything wrong about it.

    Immigration at the southern border is one of voters’ top concerns in the upcoming election.

    And Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s large-scale operation to bus thousands of migrants and asylum seekers to other U.S. cities has drawn both scrutiny and praise.

    But Wisconsin cities have not been locations where migrants, asylum seekers or other kinds of immigrants have been transported en masse.

    Despite that fact, the Republican Party of Juneau County on Facebook: “Ask Governor Evers why planes full of unvetted ‘refugees’ are being accepted at the Milw. & Madison airports!”

    The post, from June 25, 2024, has 31 shares as of July 2. Among those who shared the post were the Republican Party of Green and Lincoln counties.

    We found the claim is incorrect on multiple counts. 

    Planes full of migrants are not arriving in Wisconsin, officials say

    First, officials for both Milwaukee Mitchell International Airport and Dane County Regional Airport said planes full of refugees have not been arriving.

    “The source provides no proof, and we have no proof either. The information posted is not factual,” Harold Mester, director of public affairs and marketing for Milwaukee Mitchell Airport, said in an email.

    Kimberly Jones, director of the Dane County airport, agreed.

    “We certainly have not had ‘planes full’ of refugees coming in to our Airport. To my knowledge there is no accuracy to the statement,” Jones said in an email.

    And Gina Paige, the spokeswoman for the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families, which houses the state Bureau of Refugee Programs, said the department “has not been made aware of any migrant arrivals to Wisconsin airports.”

    Jim Mackman, director of philanthropy for Jewish Social Services of Madison, one of Wisconsin’s resettlement agencies, said the same:

    “I am not aware of a current surge of other types of migrants coming to Wisconsin.” 

    Refugees are not the same as those who cross the border without documents

    Second, the use of the word refugees in the claim is off the mark.

    The federal government defines refugees narrowly. They are not the same as migrants or asylum seekers, or others who cross the border without proper documentation.

    The State Department says a refugee is “an individual who is outside their country of nationality, or if no nationality, their last habitual residence, and who is unable or unwilling to return to, and is unwilling or unable to avail themselves of the protection of, that country because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of their race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.”

    In short, refugees are people who were forced to flee their home countries because of threats or persecution against their identity, and they are staying in a second country – often in a refugee camp – where they register with the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees. 

    After a screening process, the UNHCR then recommends refugees to be resettled in a third country. The U.S. set a ceiling of admitting 125,000 refugees in the 2024 fiscal year.

    “Refugee resettlement to the U.S. is traditionally offered to the most vulnerable refugee cases including women and children at risk, women heads of households, the elderly, survivors of violence and torture and those with acute medical needs,” the UNHCR said. 

    ‘Unvetted refugee’ is an oxymoron

    Further, the claim misunderstands how refugees are resettled in the U.S. 

    Once refugees are selected to be resettled, one of nine national refugee resettlement agencies takes their case and determines which of their local affiliates should handle the case.

    Local resettlement agencies and their volunteers set up refugees in homes, help them find jobs, take them to doctor’s appointments and English classes and more.

    Refugees do not cross the southern border to arrive, and they are not undocumented. When refugees are brought to the U.S., they receive permanent legal residency, also known as a green card.

    And while refugees do arrive in the U.S. on airplanes, they do not arrive on “planes full” of other refugees. Paige said refugees take flights as individuals, or as families, on commercial airlines.

    Finally, refugee resettlement leaders also note that an “unvetted refugee” is an oxymoron. 

    “Refugees are among the most vetted immigrants to the United States,” Mackman said.

    Paige echoed that comment.

    “Refugees go through a rigorous vetting process which usually takes 12-24 months,” she said.

    According to the UNHCR, the vetting process includes:

    • Screening by eight federal agencies including the State Department, Department of Homeland Security and the FBI

    • Six security database checks and biometric security checks screened against U.S. federal databases

    • Medical screening

    • Three in-person interviews with Department of Homeland Security officers

    It’s unclear whether the person who created the Facebook post was referring to refugees or migrants who cross the U.S.-Mexico border. People associated with the Republican Party of Juneau County, as well as the parties of Green and Lincoln counties, did not respond to emails, calls and text messages from PolitiFact Wisconsin.

    But the poster commented on their own post alluding to border crossers:

    “Where I work, I know 2 people who immigrated legally, one from Canada, one from Jamaica. Both said the process was vigorous and took weeks, and required a physical examination. Contrast that to what is going on at our borders,” the person wrote.

    Our ruling

    The Republican Party of Juneau County claimed on Facebook that planes full of unvetted refugees were being accepted to the Milwaukee and Madison airports.

    But officials from both airports, the state refugee bureau and a local resettlement agency said there was no evidence that planes full of unvetted individuals were arriving in Wisconsin. The party provides zero evidence of this, nor could we find any on our own.

    We rate the claim Pants on Fire.

     

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  • Joe Biden’s border policy is not ‘pro-child trafficking’

    Joe Biden’s border policy is not ‘pro-child trafficking’

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    Former President Donald Trump characterized President Joe Biden’s June 4 immigration order limiting asylum as “pro-child trafficking,” at a June 6 campaign event in Phoenix, Arizona. 

    Biden’s order “is pro-invasion, pro-child trafficking, pro-women trafficking, pro-human trafficking, pro-drug dealers — and they bring death and destruction into our Country. It’s really pro-illegal immigration…,” Trump also posted June 6 on Truth Social.

    Trump echoed thoughts from his former senior adviser, Stephen Miller.

    The order “exempts child trafficking to ensure trafficked children are delivered to their US destinations,” Miller said in a June 4 X post. 

    Biden’s order —  barring most people from claiming asylum if they illegally cross into the U.S. between official border crossings — exempts minors traveling without a parent or legal guardian. But does that exemption make it “pro-child trafficking?”

    Human trafficking experts we spoke with said no.

    The experts said the exemption is in line with federal laws to protect children from trafficking. They said not exempting children could make them vulnerable to dangers, including trafficking. And they pointed out that many of Trump’s own immigration policies also made exceptions for children coming alone.

    However, they also acknowledged that some children could end up in dangerous situations under Biden’s policy because family members are not exempt from the policy, even if they come with minors. 

    If families are unable to cross the border together, or have to wait for long stretches in dangerous conditions in Mexico, parents might send their children alone to the U.S. to seek protection, experts said.

    But they agreed this didn’t make Biden’s policy “pro child-trafficking.”

    Biden’s policy “does not impact how the government vets the sponsors of unaccompanied children in immigration custody,” said Melissa Adamson, an immigration attorney at National Center for Youth Law, a nonprofit law firm. 

    Biden’s policy goal is to reduce the strain on immigration officers who are encountering thousands of migrants daily, the White House said in a policy fact sheet. When the policy is in effect, people cannot apply for asylum between ports of entry. The policy takes effect anytime the weekly average of daily illegal border crossings reaches at least 2,500. (Under U.S. law people have to be physically present in the U.S. to seek asylum, regardless of how they cross.) 

    People who secure an appointment with Customs and Border Protection’s “CBP One” application can still seek asylum at a port of entry. People who are victims of a “severe form of trafficking” are also exempt from the policy. This includes sex or labor trafficking, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services says on its website. 

    Why are unaccompanied minors often exempt from border policies? 

    Laws and court settlements dictate how the government must handle unaccompanied minors who cross the U.S. border. These cases involving minors are handled differently in order to comply with federal laws that protect children from human trafficking.

    “Lawmakers recognized that immigrant children traveling without their parents are a vulnerable group that merits protection,” said Chiara Galli, a University of Chicago human development professor. “And that these children should benefit from some added protections that adults who are apprehended at the border do not have.”

    Some parents pay for smugglers to get their children to the U.S. border. But smuggling and trafficking are not synonymous; not all children who are smuggled are trafficked, experts said.

    Human trafficking “centers on exploitation,” and human smuggling “centers on transportation,” says U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

    In 2008, Congress passed the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act. The law requires immigration officials to interview all unaccompanied minors for signs that they may be trafficking victims.

    Children who are not from Mexico or Canada cannot be quickly deported and are allowed to stay in the U.S. while they await court hearings. These children are transferred to the custody of U.S. Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement who are tasked with finding and vetting sponsors for the children to live with — often family members in the U.S. 

    “If deported back to their home countries, these children risk being separated from parents, abused, and killed by gangs, and if they were deported to another country, they would certainly be vulnerable to trafficking, abuse and worse,” Galli said

    Different procedures generally apply for children from Mexico and Canada because of the country’s proximity to the U.S. 

    Not exempting unaccompanied minors from border policies can lead to legal battles

    Policy exceptions for unaccompanied minors can also protect the administration from lawsuits, Galli said, though it doesn’t make the government immune from legal challenges, Galli said. (On June 12, the ACLU and other advocacy groups sued the Biden administration over its new policy. The suit did not have to do with exceptions for unaccompanied minors. The ACLU argues the policy violates U.S. asylum law.)

    In March 2020, Trump implemented a public health policy to quickly expel people crossing the border illegally. The order didn’t include an exemption for unaccompanied minors. The ACLU and other groups sued the administration, saying in part that the move violated the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act. In November 2020, a district court blocked Trump from expelling unaccompanied minors. 

    Around 16,000 unaccompanied minors were expelled out of the U.S. under the policy from March 2020 to November 2020, said KFF, a health policy research organization. 

    Like Biden, Trump also implemented border policies that exempted unaccompanied minors. For example, the “Remain in Mexico” program required migrants to await their asylum court proceedings in Mexico.

    Our ruling

    Trump said Biden’s immigration order limiting asylum is “pro-child trafficking.”

    The order’s exemption for unaccompanied minors is not evidence that the order is “pro-child trafficking,” legal experts said.

    The exception follows federal laws to protect children from trafficking. The experts said not having the exception would endanger minors and make them more susceptible to trafficking. They pointed out that Trump’s own immigration policies also included the exception. 

    We rate Trump’s claim False.

    For help related to a case of human trafficking, the National Human Trafficking Hotline is available at 1-888-373-7888 or by email at [email protected]. U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement’s suspicious activity tip line is 1-866-DHS-2-ICE.

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  • Elon Musk, America’s richest immigrant, is angry about immigration. Can he influence the election?

    Elon Musk, America’s richest immigrant, is angry about immigration. Can he influence the election?

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    WASHINGTON — 

    Elon Musk and his brother Kimbal were speaking to a crowd of business leaders in 2013 about creating their first company when the conversation seemed to go off script. Originally from South Africa, Kimbal said the brothers lacked lawful immigration status when they began the business in the U.S.

    “In fact, when they did fund us, they realized that we were illegal immigrants,” Kimbal said, according to a recording of the interview from the Milken Institute Global Conference.

    “I’d say it was a gray area,” Elon replied with a laugh.

    Eleven years later, Elon was back at the Milken Institute last month in Beverly Hills, talking once again about immigration. This time, he described the southern border as a scene out of the zombie apocalypse and said the legal immigration process is long and “Kafkaesque.”

    “I’m a big believer in immigration, but to have unvetted immigration at large scale is a recipe for disaster,” Musk said at the conference. “So I’m in favor of greatly expediting legal immigration but having a secure southern border.”

    Musk, the most financially successful immigrant in the U.S. and the third-richest person in the world, has frequently repeated his view that it is difficult to immigrate to the U.S. legally but “trivial and fast” to enter illegally. What he leaves out: Seeking asylum is a legal right under national and international law, regardless of how a person arrives on U.S. soil.

    But as the election year ramps up and Republicans make border security a major theme of their campaigns, Musk’s comments about immigration have grown increasingly extreme. The chief executive of SpaceX and Tesla, who purchased the social media platform X (formerly Twitter) in 2022, has sometimes used his giant microphone to elevate racist conspiracies and spread misinformation about immigration law.

    Musk’s business manager did not respond to a request for comment, nor did representatives for SpaceX and Tesla. X does not have a department that responds to news media inquiries.

    While Musk’s views are clear, what’s murkier is his influence. Some see him as an influential opinion maker with the power to shape policy and sway voters, while others dismiss him as a social media bomb thrower mainly heard within a conservative echo chamber.

    “If you haven’t heard it already, I’m sure you’re going to see members of Congress citing Elon Musk and pointing to his tweets, and that’s a scary concept,” said Rep. Nanette Diaz Barragán (D-San Pedro), who leads the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

    She says she believes Musk is influential with her Republican colleagues who are “always looking for new anti-immigrant talking points.”

    Polling shows immigration is a top issue for voters. For the third month in a row, it was named by respondents to an open-ended April Gallup poll as the most important problem facing the U.S.

    The November election that’s shaping up as a rematch between President Biden and former President Trump will be the first presidential contest since Musk bought X — a site Trump had been banned from for inciting violence before Musk reinstated his account last year.

    Musk used the platform to come to Trump’s defense last week after the former president was criminally convicted for falsifying records in a hush money scheme. “Great damage was done today to the public’s faith in the American legal system,” Musk wrote on X, calling Trump’s crime a “trivial matter.”

    After meeting with Trump in March, Musk told former CNN anchor Don Lemon that he’s “leaning away” from Biden, but doesn’t plan to endorse Trump yet. He also said he won’t donate to any presidential campaign.

    Campaign contribution records show Musk regularly donated to both Republicans and Democrats through 2020. That includes a handful of donations to California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who said his relationship with Musk dates back to his time as San Francisco mayor but that they’ve never discussed immigration.

    “I think people have formed very strong opinions on this topic,” Newsom said. “I don’t know that he’s influencing that debate in a disproportionate way. Not one human being has ever said, ‘Hey, did you see Elon’s thing about immigration?’”

    How Musk talks about immigration on X

    Last year Musk visited the Eagle Pass, Texas, border, meeting with local politicians and law enforcement to get what he called an “unfiltered” view of the situation.

    He also helped spread viral reports falsely claiming the Biden administration had “secretly” flown hundreds of thousands of migrants into the U.S. to reduce border arrivals.

    “This administration is both importing voters and creating a national security threat from unvetted illegal immigrants,” Musk wrote March 5 on X. “It is highly probable that the groundwork is being laid for something far worse than 9/11.”

    But the migrants in question fly commercial under a program created by the Biden administration, exercising the president’s authority to temporarily admit people for humanitarian reasons. The program allows up to 30,000 vetted people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela lawfully relocate to the U.S. each month and obtain work permits if they have a financial sponsor.

    Contrary to Musk’s claim that the administration is looking for Democratic voters, those arriving under the program have no pathway to citizenship. The claim gives fuel to extremist ideologies such as great replacement theory, the racist conspiracy that there’s a plot to reduce the population of white people.

    Elon Musk, wearing a black Stetson hat, livestreams while visiting the southern border in September in Eagle Pass, Texas. Musk toured the border along the bank of the Rio Grande with Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas).

    (John Moore / Getty Images)

    Earlier this year, Musk targeted a controversial bill in the California Legislature that would help immigrants with serious or violent felony convictions fight deportation using state funds. Assemblymember Reggie Jones-Sawyer (D-Los Angeles) pulled the bill after Republicans slammed it on social media, garnering the attention of Musk, who wrote about it on X: “When is enough enough?”

    In February, shortly after a bipartisan group of senators released details of a border security bill that had gone through lengthy negotiations, Musk again echoed great replacement theory, writing on X: “The long-term goal of the so-called ‘Border Security’ bill is enabling illegals to vote! It will do the total opposite of securing the border.”

    Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) shot back.

    “No, it’s not focused on trying to be able to get more illegals to vote,” Lankford said on CNN. “That’s absurd.”

    Musk’s immigration journey

    There’s a particular irony in Musk attacking the program that allows limited arrivals for humanitarian reasons while simultaneously saying he favors legal immigration, said Ahilan Arulanantham, a lawyer, professor and co-director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at UCLA. The program offers would-be migrants a lawful pathway to reach the U.S. and reduced arrivals at the border from the beneficiary countries.

    “That shows a very deep confusion about a fairly basic point about immigration law and the way the policy works,” Arulanantham said. Musk’s lack of criticism of a similar program for Ukrainians illustrates the undercurrent of racism accompanying attacks on the program for Latin American migrants, he added.

    Musk amplifying false claims is counterproductive to rational immigration policy, Arulanantham said.

    “Every voice adds to the pile, and the louder the voice, the marginally greater the addition to the pile,” Arulanantham said. “He is a very loud voice.”

    David Kaye, a UC Irvine law professor who studies platform moderation, said Musk’s promotion of misleading or false statements, including those about immigrants, is concerning because he can influence conversations on X in a way no one else can.

    “There’s already a pretty robust kind of alarmist approach to immigration, so Musk might only add a little bit of fuel to a pretty big fire,” Kaye said. “But the fact is he’s got a ton of followers. To the extent he promotes disinformation, I think that’s a cause for concern for the United States having fair and fact-driven debates over immigration.”

    Musk’s own immigration story is described in the biography “Elon Musk” by Walter Isaacson. Musk left South Africa in 1989 for Canada, where his mother had relatives, Isaacson wrote. While in college he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania and, after graduating, enrolled at Stanford but immediately requested a deferral.

    He and his brother Kimbal had invented an interactive network directory service, like a precursor to Google Maps.

    Just before pitching the idea to a venture company, Kimbal was stopped by U.S. border officials at the airport on his way back from a trip to Toronto “who looked in his luggage and saw the pitch deck, business cards and other documents for the company. Because he did not have a U.S. work visa, they wouldn’t let him board the plane,” Isaacson writes in the book. So a friend picked him up and drove him into the U.S. after telling another border agent that they were seeing the David Letterman show.

    After finalizing the investment, the firm found immigration lawyers to help the Musk brothers get work visas, according to Isaacson.

    Once Musk married his first wife, he became eligible for U.S. citizenship, and took the oath in 2002 at the Los Angeles County Fairgrounds.

    Musk’s recent commentary on immigration and other political issues appears to be a reversal from his views a decade ago, said Nu Wexler, who has worked in policy communications at tech companies and for congressional Democrats.

    Wexler recalled when Musk left Fwd.us, the political action organization spearheaded by Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg in 2013 to advocate for immigration reform. Musk left because Fwd.us backed conservative lawmakers who wanted immigration reform but supported oil drilling and other policies that went against Musk’s environmental priorities.

    “I agreed to support Fwd.us because there is a genuine need to reform immigration. However, this should not be done at the expense of other important causes,” Musk told the news site AllThingsD at the time.

    When Zuckerberg created Fwd.us, it made smart business sense for tech executives to make the business case for immigration reform, Wexler said. Now, immigration is a more divisive issue and executives on the left are less willing to dive into politics.

    “At some point he decided that being the main character was helpful personal branding,” Wexler said of Musk. “I don’t know if he’s going to change minds on immigration, although he might be able to fire up the base.”

    Alex Conant, a GOP consultant and partner at the public affairs firm Firehouse Strategies, said Musk’s influence could grow if Trump wins the election. If an immigration bill were to take shape at that point, Musk’s endorsement or rejection could shape the debate, he said.

    “That’s the sort of scenario where all the sudden he might have some power,” he said.

    There appears to be growing evidence for that possibility. Trump and Musk have discussed a possible advisory role for the billionaire, the Wall Street Journal reported last week. If Trump reclaims the White House, Musk could provide formal input on border security policies.

    Times staff writer Taryn Luna contributed to this report.

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  • Ardent and Obsidian Global Form Small Business Joint Venture, Ardian Global, LLC

    Ardent and Obsidian Global Form Small Business Joint Venture, Ardian Global, LLC

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    WASHINGTON, May 21, 2024 (Newswire.com)
    –
    Ardent, a Member of Mission1st Group (Ardent), and Obsidian Global, LLC (Obsidian) have joined forces to form Ardian Global, LLC. Ardian Global is a small business Joint Venture (JV) that combines Ardent’s industry-leading geospatial intelligence, cloud computing, AI/ML, data analytics, and border security expertise with Obsidian’s cybersecurity, DevSecOps, and agile development capabilities.

    Ardian Global’s mission is to be the beacon of innovation, seamlessly integrating trusted geospatial and artificial intelligence technologies with cutting-edge data analytics, DevSecOps, cybersecurity, and agile IT professional services. This newly formed JV is dedicated to safeguarding the United States, both at home and abroad, by delivering unparalleled solutions that enhance national security and drive technological advancement. 

    Richard Zareck II, President & CEO of Ardent, expressed his enthusiasm: “As a newly graduated large business, Ardent is thrilled to partner with Obsidian on this new joint venture. With our combined expertise and strong presence across DHS, FedCiv and DoD – Ardian Global is well positioned to enhance the critical national security and defense missions while continuing our reputation for excellence.” 

    “This joint venture represents an exciting opportunity for our two companies to join forces and expand our services within the federal market,” says Drew Conway, CEO & President of Obsidian Global. “We are looking forward to working with Ardent to both further mature as a corporation and grow our capabilities as we prepare for the next steps in our business.” 

    About Ardent 

    A digital transformation, location intelligence, and data analytics firm, Ardent brings a significant history of innovative proven best practices “at the speed of the mission” to Federal Civilian agencies, DHS mission components, State and Local entities, and the commercial and non-profit sectors. Ardent Management Consulting is certified to 9001:2015, its Development Projects are CMMI-Dev V2.0 Maturity Level 3 rated and its management systems (ISMS/ITSMS) are certified to IS0 27001:2013 and ISO 20000-1:2018 standards by G-CERTi Co., Ltd., NIST AI Safety Consortium. For media inquiries, please contact: Clayton Wear at public.relations@ardentmc.com.  

    About Obsidian Global 

    Obsidian Global, LLC (Obsidian), a small business Information Technology services firm, specializes in Cybersecurity, DevSecOps, Agile Development, Cloud & IT Services, and Enterprise Architecture Design. Obsidian is a Prime government contract holder for many IDIQ and Blanket Purchase Agreements (BPAs) including the Air Force (AF) SBEAS vehicle ($13.4B), where we support AF applications development and cybersecurity operations task orders. Under our GSA MAS contract, we implement DevSecOps practices and provide database administration, systems administration, and cybersecurity operations. Obsidian is a Prime on the DoE CPSS BPA ($300M) where we provide data center security, ATO, ISSO, and cybersecurity communication support among other disciplines. Additionally, Obsidian has successfully met the standards of ISO 9001:2015, ISO 27001:2013, and ISO 20000-1:2018 through certification, and appraised at CMMI Maturity Level 3 for Development and Services.  

    Source: Ardent

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  • Arizona judge declares mistrial in the case of a rancher accused of fatally shooting a migrant

    Arizona judge declares mistrial in the case of a rancher accused of fatally shooting a migrant

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    PHOENIX — An Arizona judge declared a mistrial Monday in the case of a rancher accused of fatally shooting a Mexican man on his property near the U.S.-Mexico border.

    The decision came after jurors failed to reach a unanimous decision after more than two full days of deliberation in trial of George Alan Kelly, 75, who was charged with second-degree murder in the Jan. 30, 2023, shooting of Gabriel Cuen-Buitimea.

    “Based upon the jury’s inability to reach a verdict on any count,” Superior Court Judge Thomas Fink said, “This case is in mistrial.”

    The Santa Cruz County Attorney’s Office can still decide whether to retry Kelly for any charge, or drop the case all together.

    A status hearing was scheduled for next Monday afternoon, when prosecutors could inform the judge if they plan to refile the case. Prosecutors did not immediately respond to emailed requests for additional comment.

    Kelly was charged with second-degree murder in killing of Cuen-Buitimea, 48, who lived just south of the border in Nogales, Mexico.

    Prosecutors said Kelly recklessly fired nine shots from an AK-47 rifle toward a group of men, including Cuen-Buitimea, about 100 yards (90 meters) away on his cattle ranch. Kelly has said he fired warning shots in the air, but he didn’t shoot directly at anyone.

    Court officials took jurors to Kelly’s ranch as well as a section of the border. Fink denied news media requests to tag along.

    After Monday’s ruling, Consul General Marcos Moreno Baez of the Mexican consulate in Nogales, Arizona, said he would wait with Cuen-Buitimea’s two adult daughters on Monday evening to meet with prosecutors from Santa Cruz County Attorney’s Office to learn about the implications of a mistrial.

    “Mexico will continue to follow the case and continue to accompany the family, which wants justice.” said Moreno. “We hope for a very fair outcome.”

    Kelly’s defense attorney Brenna Larkin did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment after the ruling was issued. Larkin had asked Fink to have jurors keep deliberating another day.

    Kelly had earlier rejected an agreement with prosecutors that would have reduced the charge to one count of negligent homicide if he pleaded guilty.

    Kelly was also charged with aggravated assault that day against another person in the group of about eight people, including a man from Honduras who was living in Mexico and who testified during the trial that he had gone into the U.S. that day seeking work.

    The other migrants weren’t injured and they all made it back to Mexico.

    Cuen-Buitimea lived just south of the border in Nogales, Mexico. He had previously entered the U.S. illegally several times and was deported, most recently in 2016, court records show.

    The nearly monthlong trial coincided with a presidential election year that has drawn widespread interest in border security.

    Fink had told jurors that if they could not reach a verdict on the second-degree murder charge, they could try for a unanimous decision on a lesser charge of reckless manslaughter or negligent homicide. A second-degree murder conviction would have brought a minimum prison sentence of 10 years.

    The jury got the case Thursday afternoon, deliberated briefly that day and then all of Friday and Monday.

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  • Pro-Biden flyers were not made by migrant resource center

    Pro-Biden flyers were not made by migrant resource center

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    False claims that Democrats want noncitizens to vote have been amplified by former President Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Republican influencers. Now a social media post is claiming to have evidence of a scheme to encourage noncitizen migrants to vote for President Joe Biden. 

    The Oversight Project run by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, posted on X what it said was a Spanish-language flyer distributed by the Resource Center Matamoros in Mexico. The Mexican organization provides legal and social support services to migrants trying to get to the United States.

    “Flyers distributed at NGO in Mexico encouraging illegals to vote for President Biden,” said the caption of Oversight Project’s April 15 post, which has more than 9 million views. (NGO stands for nongovernmental organization.)

    The flyer said in Spanish: “Reminder to vote for president Biden when you are in the United States. We need another four years of his mandate to stay open.” 

    The flyer shows the Resource Center Matamoros’ logo, address, website and phone number. It also shows a Biden campaign logo with the phrase in Spanish: “Todos con Biden,” (All with Biden.)

    But a Biden campaign spokesperson called the flyer “disinformation” and the center’s leader told news outlets her group didn’t make it. Here’s what we know.

    The Oversight Project said on X that the flyer was posted throughout the Resource Center Matamoros’ facilities, including the wall of a portable bathroom and that “they also appear to be handed out when illegal aliens” seek the center’s assistance.

    The Oversight Project shared a video that it said comes from an X account, @realmuckraker that posts about the border and immigration. The video shows tents and portable bathrooms; the person filming the video enters multiple bathrooms and finds the flyer hanging on a wall. 

    The flyer raised concerns with conservatives. On X, Florida state Sen. Blaise Ingoglia, R-Spring Hill,  shared the Oversight Project’s post, and said he would file a bill in the next legislative session that would make it a felony to distribute literature such as the flyer and would fine any Florida organization that distributed such literature.

    U.S. Reps. Dan Bishop, R-N.C., and Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., also showed a poster with the flyer at an April 16 House hearing questioning Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. The Oversight Project has linked Mayorkas to the center.  

    Oversight Project Executive Director Mike Howell told PolitiFact his organization made no claims about who made or distributed the flyer, but was shocked “that such a flyer was at a non-profit that is staging illegal aliens to enter the United States.”

    “The Oversight Project is currently investigating a myriad of threads to the integrity of our election system and remains concerned about the foreign influence that illegals can have in our voting system,” Howell said.

    The Oversight Project on X also posted a nine-second audio clip of a conversation between a man and a woman, which the center said is Resource Center Matamoros founder Gaby Zavala. “In all honesty, we’re just trying to help as many people as possible before, you know, before Trump gets re-elected,” the man said. “Believe me, we are in the same boat,” the woman said. It’s unclear from the clip whether the woman’s voice is Zavala’s or the conversation is in full context.

    The flyer mentions that the center is the home of HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. The center has rented space to the society, for which Mayorkas served on the board before becoming DHS secretary. But the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society told The Associated Press that it neither made the flyers nor supported the flyer’s message. The society also said it hasn’t rented space or had ties with the Mexican center since 2022.

    Biden’s campaign told PolitiFact it had nothing to do with that flyer.

    “This is disinformation, and should be labeled that way on platforms Americans trust to provide truthful information — from the social platform where it originated to the media organizations reporting on it,” Ammar Moussa, a Biden campaign spokesperson, told PolitiFact via email.

    Zavala told The Associated Press she doesn’t know who made the flyer and that her group “does not encourage immigrants to register to vote or cast ballots in the U.S.”

    We called and emailed Zavala and her organization, but received no response.

    Fox News National Correspondent Bill Melugin posted on X that the flyer “seems fake or doctored, even at first glance,” and noted several dubious elements, including that the Spanish word for welcome is misspelled and that some of the text is a translation of the organization’s website.

    PolitiFact also examined the flyer closely. Here are some notable details:

    • Flyer says “Bienvedinos,” a misspelling of “bienvenidos” — the Spanish word for welcome.

    • The first two sentences in the flyer appear to be an exact Spanish translation of the organizations Who We Are page. We pasted the English sentences on Google Translate and it gave us the exact Spanish phrasing seen in the flyer. 

    (Screenshot of flyer from Oversight Project’s X post.)

    The center’s Our Mission, Who We Are and Our Services website pages do not say it supports Biden, nor do they tell asylum seekers to support him. The Who We Are page says that the center has worked “closely with representatives from the US and Mexican governments … for more humane treatment of asylum seekers.”

    PolitiFact has debunked similar misinformation about noncitizens voting. Some false claims say that voter registration by noncitizens is rampant and that the Biden administration wants to end voter ID laws so that noncitizens can register and vote. Only U.S. citizens are eligible to vote in federal elections for Congress and president. Some cities, including in California, Maryland and Vermont, allow noncitizens to vote in local elections, such as for mayor or city council. 

    Election officials told PolitiFact that fears of noncitizen voting ignore states’ safeguards to prevent it from happening.

    “It’s important for people to know that voter registration is secure, and eligibility is verified through several mechanisms,” said Amanda López Askin, the local elections official in Doña Ana County, New Mexico. “Disinformation is dangerous to migrants, election officials, and is overall unhealthy for our democracy.”

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  • ‘Migrant influencer’ in custody after videos on legal loopholes

    ‘Migrant influencer’ in custody after videos on legal loopholes

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    (NewsNation) — A man who came to the U.S. illegally from Venezuela is now in custody after going viral for bragging about getting free money from America and encouraging other newcomers to take advantage of U.S. laws protecting squatters.

    In one TikTok video, Leonel Moreno, now being called the “migrant influencer,” explained squatting laws and suggested how to take advantage of them. His account has now been removed from the platform.

    “I learned that there is a law that says if a house is not inhabited, then we can take it,” he said. “Here in the United States, terrain deformation also applies, and I think that will be my next business: invade abandoned houses.”

    Moreno crossed into the country illegally in April 2022 in Eagle Pass, Texas and was paroled, but authorities say he never showed up to his initial check-in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

    When Moreno was initially processed, he was placed in the Alternatives to Detention program, where he was given a cell phone as a tracking device.

    But because he didn’t follow the rules, Department of Homeland Security sources told NewsNation he was listed as a preorder absconder and was terminated from the program.

    These sources later confirmed to NewsNation that Moreno was in custody.

    Moreno has an order to appear in a Florida court in February of 2025, but authorities had trouble tracking him down. The address he initially provided was for Catholic Charities in Miami, but sources said he now has a possible address listed in Ohio.

    Also in Ohio, Fermin Garcia-Gutierrez is another man allegedly taking advantage of the system and gaps in intelligence.

    Law enforcement in Butler County, Ohio, said Garcia-Gutierrez has been in Sheriff Richard Jones’ jail 11 times, using seven different names and three different dates of birth. According to Jones, Garcia-Gutierrez has been reported eight times, yet the 46-year-old keeps returning successfully.

    Garcia-Gutierrez’s latest arrest was for possession of drugs and weapons while intoxicated and obstructing. His story is not the only one, with Jones saying since 2021, the county has housed nearly 1,000 immigrant inmates with ICE detainers.

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  • Does Joe Biden have an ‘immunity from deportation’ policy?

    Does Joe Biden have an ‘immunity from deportation’ policy?

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    After police said a Georgia nursing student was killed by a Venezuelan immigrant, criticism over President Joe Biden’s immigration policies intensified. 

    Laken Riley, 22, was killed Feb. 22 while on a jog at the University of Georgia. The suspect, an immigrant from Venezuela, entered the U.S. illegally in September 2022, Immigration and Customs Enforcement said. 

    Former President Donald Trump says Riley’s death is evidence of what he termed “Biden migrant crime,” although studies show that immigrants in the U.S. illegally are less likely than people born in the U.S. to commit crimes.

    During a recent campaign rally in Rome, Georgia, Trump cited Riley’s killing to condemn what he characterized as Biden’s deportation policies. 

    “Biden has implemented a formal policy that illegal aliens who intrude into the United States are granted immunity from deportation,” Trump said. “Thus, when this monster showed up at our border, he was set free immediately under the program Crooked Joe created — I call it, ‘Free To Kill.’”

    Trump did not clarify what policies he was referring to, and his campaign did not answer our request for comment.

    ICE told PolitiFact that murder suspect Jose Ibarra was given a temporary entry into the country via a process known as parole, allowing him to be released into the U.S. to await further immigration proceedings. But that’s not evidence that Biden has a policy granting people immunity from deportation, immigration experts said. 

    The U.S. has expelled, removed or returned people out of the U.S. around 3.8 million times under Biden, according to PolitiFact’s analysis of Department of Homeland Security data.

    Because of limited resources, Biden implemented deportation priorities 

    On Biden’s first day in office, the DHS published a memo pausing the removals of certain people illegally in the U.S. for 100 days. But federal courts blocked the pause.

    The memo also acknowledged that because of resource constraints, and increased illegal border crossings, resources should be directed to the border and removals should be prioritized for people who threatened national security or public safety or who entered the U.S. after Nov. 1, 2020. 

    “While resources should be allocated to the priorities enumerated above, nothing in this memorandum prohibits the apprehension or detention of individuals unlawfully in the United States who are not identified as priorities herein,” the memo added.

    The memo would not have applied to Ibarra, who entered the U.S. in 2022. 

    In September 2021, DHS released a second memo detailing similar guidelines, instructing ICE to prioritize the removal of people who have crossed the border in recent years or who threaten public safety. Courts also halted those guidelines in 2021, but they were reinstated in 2023 after a Supreme Court decision.

    The Supreme Court said that no administration has had enough resources to arrest or remove all people illegally crossing the border. The federal government therefore had to prioritize the use of available resources, the court said.

    “It may be that Biden’s choice means that certain criminal offenders will not get deported,” said Rick Su, a University of North Carolina Chapel Hill immigration law professor. “But it is not really granting any legal ‘immunity.’ And criminal sentences are still served.”

    Foreign relations, immigration law, resources can dictate deporations 

    Many people who cross the border illegally cannot be immediately deported, but not because of a Biden administration policy. Immigration law, congressional appropriations and foreign policy all factor in what happens to a person at the border. 

    Under immigration law, when people cross the border illegally they can be quickly deported without a formal proceeding in immigration court, unless they’re requesting asylum. That rapid deportation is known as expedited removal. Asylum officers must determine whether migrants have a credible case for seeking asylum.

    “Even those folks, seeking asylum, are certainly not ‘immune’ from deportation and must prove that they meet the standard for either asylum protection, withholding of removal protection, or protection under the Convention Against Torture, in order to remain in the United States,” said  Lindsay Harris, the International Human Rights Clinic director at the University of San Francisco. 

    The volume of people coming to the border and the limited resources appropriated by Congress mean the government must release people to await formal immigration court proceedings,  Theresa Cardinal Brown, the Bipartisan Policy Center’s senior adviser for immigration and border policy, said in a February interview with Katie Couric. A backlog of millions of immigration court cases means it could take years for these new cases to be resolved.

    People’s nationality also affects what happens to them at the border. 

    Under Biden, people are arriving at the border from more countries than in the past, the Migration Policy Institute wrote in a January report. And to deport people, the U.S. needs a working relationship with their countries of origin.

    For example, because of fraught diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Venezuela, Venezuelans cannot be easily deported. Ibarra crossed the U.S.-Mexico border before October 2003, when Venezuela did not accept its own deported nationals and before Mexico began accepting a limited number of deported Venezuelans. People from countries that don’t cooperate with U.S. removals must be released because federal law prohibits indefinite detention.

    “That is not immunity for deportation,” said Sarah Sherman-Stokes, associate director for Boston University’s Immigrants’ Rights and Human Trafficking Program. “It may be a temporary delay in deportation but those people who are slated for deportation and who the administration is unable to remove are under surveillance.”

    Programs to quickly release people aren’t deportation immunity, immigration experts say

    The number of people reaching the border has been rising, stressing resources. That has led the Biden administration to apply different processes to quickly move people out of Border Patrol processing centers. 

    “Due to limited resources, DHS cannot respond to all immigration violations or remove all individuals who are determined to be in the U.S. without lawful immigration status,” a September 2022 Government Accountability Office report said.

    One of these processes, used in fiscal years 2021 and 2022, was called “parole + ATD.” Under that process, people were enrolled in the Alternatives to Detention program, which uses technology such as GPS tracking, ankle monitors or a smartphone app to track people’s locations. They also were paroled into the country and required to appear at an ICE office a few weeks later to officially begin their removal proceedings in immigration court.

    People who threatened national security or public safety or presented an “unmitigable flight risk,” could not be enrolled in the program, according to a CBP memo. A federal court blocked the program in March 2023. 

    But these processes don’t exempt people from deportation, immigration experts said. 

    People under parole “can be deported if they affirmatively do something that is deportable, like commit an ‘aggravated felony’ or a ‘crime involving moral turpitude,’” such as murder or rape, Su said.

    “Parole is not immunity from deportation,” Sherman-Stokes said. “Parole provides a temporary entry into the United States, but people on parole are placed into deportation proceedings and have to make a claim for why they should be able to remain in the United States with authorization.”

    Our ruling

    Trump said, “Biden has implemented a formal policy that illegal aliens who intrude into the United States are granted immunity from deportation.”

    The U.S. has expelled, removed or returned people on about 3.8 million occasions during Biden’s administration, PolitiFact’s analysis of DHS data shows.

    And immigration experts told PolitiFact that DHS’ priorities for deportation and processes under the Biden administration intended to quickly move people out of Border Patrol processing centers are not giving people immunity from deportation. 

    We rate Trump’s claim False.

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  • Fact-checking Sen. Britt on sex trafficking survivor’s story

    Fact-checking Sen. Britt on sex trafficking survivor’s story

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    Delivering the Republican response to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address, U.S. Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., told the harrowing story of a woman who was sex trafficked by drug cartels when she was 12. In the same breath,  Britt blamed Biden for not only creating but inviting a crisis at the U.S. southern border.  

    Britt listed actions Biden took in his first 100 days in office and said she took a different approach, traveling to the U.S.-Mexico border when she took office in 2023. 

    “That’s where I spoke to a woman who shared her story with me. She had been sex trafficked by the cartels starting at the age of 12,” Britt said. “She told me not just that she was raped every day. But how many times a day she was raped. The cartels put her on a mattress in a shoebox of a room and they certainly run through that door over and over again for hours and hours on end.”

    “We wouldn’t be okay with this happening in a third world country. This is the United States of America,” Britt continued. “And it is past time, in my opinion, that we start acting like it. President Biden’s border policies are a disgrace. This crisis is despicable. And the truth is it is almost entirely preventable.”

    But the woman Britt was speaking about was trafficked in the 2000s in central Mexico, not in the U.S. or during Biden’s presidency. The survivor has said it was not a drug cartel that trafficked her, and PolitiFact found no evidence that she was attempting to migrate to the U.S. when it happened.

    Jonathan Katz, a freelance journalist and former The Associated Press reporter, posted a video March 8 on TikTok fact-checking Britt’s retelling of the events — notably that this did not happen during Biden’s presidency, or in the United States.

    @katzonearth This isn’t going to make her like TikTok more. #katiebritt #sotu #stateoftheunion #lies #politicians #biden2024 #trump2024 #immigration #traffickingawarenes #mexico #bordersecurity #fyp ♬ original sound – Jonathan M. Katz

    On “Fox News Sunday,” Britt told host Shannon Bream that she was contrasting Biden’s first 100 days with hers, during which she visited the southern border. 

    “I very clearly said I spoke to a woman who told me about when she was trafficked when she was 12… She was a victims’ rights advocate who was telling this is what drug cartels are doing, this is how they’re profiting off of women and it is disgusting,” Britt said.

    A Britt spokesperson did not respond to PolitiFact’s request for comment, but confirmed to The Washington Post that Britt was talking about Karla Jacinto Romero, a Mexican woman in her thirties and an activist against sex trafficking. She has told her story about surviving sex trafficking in Mexico at various forums, including before the U.S. Congress in 2015. 

    Britt met Jacinto in Del Rio, Texas, during a discussion about human trafficking.

    Here’s a look into Britt’s misleading framing of Jacinto’s story, and the facts she got wrong.

    The facts behind Jacinto’s sex trafficking story

    Jacinto’s trafficking happened in the 2000s: Jacinto was sex trafficked at 12 years old, as Britt said. But this didn’t happen during Biden’s administration. Jacinto was trafficked decades before, from 2004 to 2008, during President George W. Bush’s administration, according to Jacinto’s bio in U.S. House records. 

    Britt used Jacinto’s story to illustrate the dangers of migration through the U.S.-Mexico border under Biden.

    “We wouldn’t be okay with this happening in a third world country. This is the United States of America,” Britt said. (The term “third world country” is an outdated label often used to describe developing, low-income countries.)

    Jacinto’s trafficking happened in Mexico: Jacinto’s trafficking occurred in central Mexico, not in the United States.

    While retelling her story on a Mexican government agency’s YouTube page, Jacinto said she grew up in an abusive home and at 12 fell in love with a man. She eventually left her home and went to live with him in central Mexico near a city called Puebla. 

    “For years and years I was coerced, intimidated, threatened, beaten, robbed of my children and emotionally and sexually violated time and time again,” Jacinto testified to Congress in 2015. “During those years, I was forced to serve every type of fetish imaginable to more than 40,000 clients. Of those, many were foreigners visiting my city looking to have sexual interactions with minors like me.”

    Jacinto said a pimp trafficked her: Britt also claimed it was cartels that trafficked Jacinto. However, PolitiFact listened to multiple videos from different sources of Jacinto telling her story and did not find any where she said it was cartels who trafficked her. 

    Jacinto wasn’t trafficked by Mexican drug cartels, “but by a pimp that operated as part of a family that entrapped vulnerable girls in order to force them into prostitution,” said CNN Reporter Rafael Romo, who spoke to Jacinto, on March 11.

    Jacinto told CNN that Britt did not ask for permission to use her story.

    “I hardly ever cooperate with politicians because it seems to me that they only want an image, they only want a photo and that to me is not fair,” Jacinto said, according to CNN’s translation of her interview. “I think Sen. Britt should first take into account what really happens before telling a story of that magnitude.”

    No evidence that Jacinto’s trafficking was related to immigration: Britt’s recounting of Jacinto’s story also gave the impression that Jacinto’s trafficking happened as she tried to migrate to the United States. But Jacinto did not say that in her testimony to Congress or various news and podcast interviews.

    Our ruling

    While speaking about Biden’s immigration policies, Britt said a woman had been “sex trafficked by the cartels starting at the age of 12 … We wouldn’t be okay with this happening in a third world country. This is the United States of America.”

    Britt was talking about Jacinto, who was sex trafficked when she was 12 years old. But Britt omitted significant facts and context about when and where this happened. It was in the early 2000s in Mexico, not during the Biden administration or in the United States. 

    Jacinto has said a pimp trafficked her after she left an abusive home and went to live with a man she fell in love with. Jacinto has not said this was related to immigration to the United States.

    We rate Britt’s claim False.

    RELATED: Fact-checking Katie Britt’s immigration claims in Republican 2024 State of the Union response

    RELATED: Fact-checking Joe Biden’s 2024 State of the Union address

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  • Verificando el discurso de Joe Biden del Estado de la Unión

    Verificando el discurso de Joe Biden del Estado de la Unión

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    Joe Biden utilizó su discurso sobre el Estado de la Unión en 2024 para adoptar una postura de lucha. 

    Biden no dijo el nombre del expresidente Donald Trump en sus comentarios, pero invocó con frecuencia el historial y las propuestas de Trump, refiriéndose a él normalmente como “mi predecesor.” 

    Algunos republicanos criticaron a Biden desde que entró a la sala. La representante Marjorie Taylor Greene, republicana de Georgia, cuestionó a Biden por el asesinato de la estudiante de enfermería de la Universidad de Georgia Laken Riley. Un inmigrante ilegalmente en el país es acusado de la muerte de Riley.

    Biden se presentó como protector y defensor de los estadounidenses y su prosperidad, promoviendo políticas para aliviar los préstamos estudiantiles y reducir los precios de los medicamentos recetados.

    Biden reiteró su llamado a los congresistas republicanos para que aprueben la ayuda a Ucrania, que está luchando contra una invasión rusa. 

    También pidió a Hamás que liberase a los rehenes israelíes en Gaza, a la vez que anunció un plan para construir un embarcadero temporal para ampliar la ayuda humanitaria a los palestinos atrapados en el fuego cruzado.

    Hemos comprobado declaraciones clave sobre inmigración, economía, crimen y derechos reproductivos.

    Inmigración 

    Dialogo sobre Laken Riley y el inmigrante acusado de su asesinato

    Durante años, los republicanos han culpado a Biden de la inmigración ilegal, históricamente alta bajo su mandato. Algunos republicanos llevaban pins rojos y blancos que decían “Alto a la crisis fronteriza de Biden”. 

    Cuando Biden entró en la Cámara de Representantes, Greene le entregó un pin con un texto que decía: “Di su nombre: Laken Riley”, la estudiante de la Universidad de Georgia asesinada. 

    Mientras hablaba de seguridad fronteriza e inmigración, Greene interrumpió a Biden y le retó a decir el nombre de Riley. 

    “Lincoln Riley, una joven inocente que fue asesinada por un ilegal”, dijo Biden, pronunciando mal el nombre de Riley.

    Algunos demócratas de alto nivel le criticaron por utilizar la expresión “ilegal”, argumentando que es deshumanizadora.

    “Debería haber dicho indocumentados”, dijo en CNN la ex presidenta de la Cámara de Representantes, la demócrata Nancy Pelosi de California.

    “Permítanme ser clara: ningún ser humano es ilegal”, publicó en X la representante Ilhan Omar, demócrata de Minnesota. 

    Durante la respuesta republicana al discurso de Biden, Katie Britt, senadora de Alabama, dijo que el presidente “optó por liberar” a EE.UU. al hombre acusado de matar a Riley.

    “Fue brutalmente asesinada por uno de los millones de inmigrantes ilegales que el presidente Biden decidió liberar en nuestra patria”, dijo Britt.

    José Ibarra, el hombre acusado del asesinato de Riley, cruzó ilegalmente la frontera entre Estados Unidos y México en septiembre de 2022. Ibarra fue puesto en libertad condicional, lo que le permite ser liberado en los EE.UU. a la espera de nuevos procedimientos de inmigración, de acuerdo con el Servicio de Inmigración y Control de Aduanas (ICE, por sus siglas en inglés).

    Biden no decide quién entra en el país. Los funcionarios de fronteras deciden a quién dejan en libertad porque carecen de recursos suficientes para detener a todas las personas que cruzan ilegalmente las fronteras estadounidenses.

    Economía 

    “La inflación ha bajado del 9% al 3%, ¡la más baja del mundo!”.

    EE.UU. tiene una inflación más baja que la mayoría de los países industrializados avanzados, pero no ocupa el primer puesto a nivel internacional.

    Biden tiene razón en que la inflación ha bajado del 9% en el verano de 2022 a poco más del 3% en la actualidad, en medio de fuertes subidas de los tipos de interés por parte de la Reserva Federal.

    En diciembre de 2023, siete países de la Organización para la Cooperación y el Desarrollo Económico  — Canadá, Dinamarca, Italia, Letonia, Lituania, Países Bajos y Corea del Sur — tenían tasas de inflación inferiores a la de Estados Unidos. 

    Veinte países miembros de la OCDE tenían tasas de inflación superiores a las de EE.UU., entre ellos Francia, Alemania y el Reino Unido, que pertenecen al G-7 de economías de élite.

    Crimen

    “América es más segura hoy que cuando asumí el cargo “, dijo Biden, afirmando que el año antes de convertirse en presidente, “los asesinatos subieron un 30%”, “el incremento más grande en la historia”.

    El crimen violento ha disminuido recientemente en los Estados Unidos, y Biden se atribuyó la responsabilidad. 

    Es verdad que los homicidios incrementaron un 30% en 2020, y fue considerado el incremento anual más significativo en más de una década. Pero Biden ignoró que el aumento coincidió con la pandemia de COVID-19.

    Promocionando su Acta del Plan de Rescate Americano de 2022 como “la mayor inversión en seguridad pública jamás realizada”, Biden señaló la tasa de homicidios de 2023. “El año pasado, la tasa de asesinatos vio la disminución más pronunciada en la historia. Los crímenes violentos cayeron a uno de los niveles más bajos en más de 50 años. Pero tenemos más por hacer”.

    Los crímenes violentos han disminuido desde los récords de 2020, pero esto es por varios factores, dicen expertos, algunos que están fuera del control de Biden. 

    Usando datos de cientos de ciudades, criminalistas estimaron que los homicidios en 2023 disminuyeron alrededor de un 12% comparado con 2022. Los números son considerados preliminares, pero los analistas de crimen dicen que si los números finales se mantienen igual, esto representaría una de las mayores disminuciones de homicidios en un solo año desde que se comenzaron a llevar registros de delitos en Estados Unidos.

    A pesar de la disminución, los datos muestran que se espera que la tasa de homicidios de 2023 sea aproximadamente un 18% más alta que en 2019, antes de que la pandemia comenzará. 

    La implementación de algunas legislaciones pudo haber ayudado a hacer que la tendencia disminuyera, dijeron investigadores. Estas son el Acta del Plan de Rescate, que incluía financiación para iniciativas comunitarias de seguridad pública, y la Ley Bipartidista de Comunidades más Seguras de 2022, que financió ayuda a estados para reducir el uso de armas de fuego.  

    Otros factores contribuyentes probablemente incluyen un alivio de las disrupciones sociales por la pandemia y los esfuerzos individuales de las ciudades en respuesta a los aumentos en homicidios. 

    Derechos reproductivos 

    “La Corte Suprema de Alabama cerró los tratamientos de fecundación in vitro en todo el estado, a raíz de una decisión de la Corte Suprema que anuló Roe vs. Wade”.

    El 16 de febrero, la Corte Suprema de Alabama dijo que los embriones congelados deben considerarse niños. 

    La decisión no tiene el poder de terminar los tratamientos de fecundación in vitro (FIV) en todo el estado. Pero provocó que varias clínicas suspendieran los tratamientos de FIV mientras analizaban la decisión y las posibles responsabilidades.

    Desde entonces, los legisladores de Alabama han aprobado leyes para proteger a los proveedores de FIV de la responsabilidad civil o penal, en un intento de proteger los tratamientos de fertilidad tras la creciente reacción. Dos clínicas anunciaron que reanudaban sus operaciones después de que la gobernadora republicana Kay Ivey firmara la ley.

    La senadora demócrata Tammy Duckworth de Illinois, quien tuvo dos hijas fecundadas in vitro, presentó un proyecto de ley federal similar para proteger la fecundación in vitro. Pero la senadora Cindy Hyde-Smith, republicana de Mississippi, lo bloqueó el 28 de febrero, diciendo que era una “gran extralimitación que está llena de píldoras venenosas que van demasiado lejos — mucho más allá de garantizar el acceso legal a la FIV”.

    Loreben Tuquero y Marta Campabadal Graus, redactoras de PolitiFact, han contribuido a este reportaje.

    Una versión de este artículo originalmente fue escrito en inglés y traducido por María Briceño y Marta Campabadal Graus.

    Read a version of this article in English.

    Lea más reportes de PolitiFact en Español aquí.

    Debido a limitaciones técnicas, partes de nuestra página web aparecen en inglés. Estamos trabajando en mejorar la presentación.

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