What President Donald Trump said:
“I’ve been hearing a lot of things: ‘Oh the wall didn’t make that much of a difference.’ You know where it made a big difference? Right here in El Paso.”
False.
Trump is repeating his widely debunked claim made in his State of the Union address that El Paso, Texas, transformed from “one of the most dangerous cities” into one of the safest U.S. cities after the construction of barriers at the border.
El Paso was never one of the most dangerous cities in the country. It has had a consistently lower crime rate than the average among more than 20 similarly sized cities, according to FBI data. In that group, El Paso reported the second-lowest violent crime rate in 2008 — before the construction of border fencing. And after the barrier was completed, it held the rank while the violent crime rate did not change considerably.
The inaccurate claim has also drawn the rebuke of Democratic and Republican local politicians alike, including Beto O’Rourke, the former Democratic congressman from El Paso, and the Republican mayor of the city.
“I don’t care if the mayor is a Democrat or a Republican, they are full of crap when they say the border barrier didn’t help lower the crime rate,” Trump said, again adding falsely, “It didn’t stay the same. It went way down.”
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What was said:
“If we cut detention space, we are cutting loose dangerous criminals into our country.”
This is disputed.
Before Trump took the stage Monday night, lawmakers in Washington reached a tentative deal on border security that included funding for physical barriers at the border and the reduction of detention space for migrants.
Democrats had sought to limit the number of detention beds under the control of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, arguing that limiting the beds would force the agency to prioritize migrants with serious criminal records. Matt Albence, the deputy director of ICE, said a reduction in the number of beds would mean the release of criminals.
Whether or not ICE would be forced to released hardened criminals is a prediction that cannot be fact checked, but available data suggests that most immigrants in detention have not committed serious crimes. Records obtained by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University show that in June 2018, for example, ICE held more than 44,000 migrants in detention facilities across the country. Of these migrants, 58 percent had no criminal conviction and 21 percent had committed minor offenses such as traffic violations or illegal entry while 18 percent had been convicted of serious crimes.
ICE has disputed that breakdown but used a broader measure for its figures: The agency said 54 percent of detained immigrants had criminal records or faced pending charges, although it did not specify what crimes they were accused of committing.
Other claims:
In addition, Trump repeated at least eight other claims The New York Times has previously checked:
— He exaggerated when he claimed that he had presided over an “economic miracle.” (The strong economy is a continuation of trends that began before Trump took office.)
— He falsely claimed that terminally ill patients could not get access to experimental drugs before he signed a “Right to Try” law. (A similar federal program had existed for decades before Trump signed the law last summer.)
— He claimed that the United States was “now the No. 1 producer of oil and natural gas.” (This has been the case since 2013.)
— He misleadingly claimed that lawmakers had been trying to pass Veterans Choice for four decades. (Although Trump has presided over reforms to the program, Veterans Choice was signed into law under President Barack Obama.)
— He falsely claimed the government “couldn’t fire anybody” before he signed a Veterans Affairs Accountability Act. (He signed a law that would make it easier to remove bad employees, but the department had been able to fire people before.)
— He falsely accused Hillary Clinton and Democrats of colluding with Russia. (There is no evidence of this.)
— He claimed that immigration officials had made 266,000 arrests of immigrants in the country illegally who had committed crimes like murder, sexual assault and kidnapping. (The most common offenses were immigration, traffic and drug violations.)
— He falsely claimed that only 2 percent of arrested immigrants in the country illegally return for court hearings. (The accurate figure is about 72 percent.)
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.