1. A central argument of Trump's campaign is that there is a violent crime wave fueled by undocumented immigrants The DATA shows the opposite is true. Violent crime is plummeting. So Trump fills his stump speech with anecdotes of crimes committed by migrants, pinning the blame on Biden and Harris. Trump claims if he wins in November, those crimes will stop. But there were similar crimes committed during Trump's presidency. Trump blamed Democrats. 🧵
2. "Our crime rate is going up while crime statistics all over the world are plunging," Trump told the crowd at the Turning Point Action Conference last week in West Palm Beach, Florida. "We have a new form of crime. It's called migrant crime."
3. The crime rate in the United States is not "going up" — it is sharply declining. Violent crime has declined or remained flat every year of the Biden administration. The last time violent crime increased on an annual basis was 2020, when homicides spiked during the last year of
4. Moreover, there is no evidence of an increase in "migrant crime." Crime analyst Jeff Asher looked at 2023 data in the 14 Texas counties that share a border with Mexico. If undocumented immigrants were fueling a crime wave, one would expect it to be concentrated in these border
5. These facts have not stopped the GOP from blaming individual criminal acts by undocumented immigrants on the Biden administration. When a six-year-old girl was tragically hit by an undocumented drunk driver and left with serious injuries, the Republican Party saw it as an
6. A review of media reports during the first Trump administration reveals that crime by undocumented immigrants did not start when Trump left office. When an undocumented immigrant committed a crime during the Trump administration, Trump blamed Democrats.
7. When an Iowa college student, Molly Tibbetts, was murdered by an undocumented immigrant in the summer of 2018, Trump blamed Democrats. "Democrat immigration policies are destroying innocent lives and spilling very innocent blood," Trump said.
8. In a 2018 ad for his unsuccessful reelection campaign, Trump said that Democrats are "complicit in every murder committed by illegal immigrants." What has changed is not the existence of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants — or the volume of those crimes — but how
9. Do you know someone who should know the facts about migrant crime in the United States? It's all right here, with links to primary sources:
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