Fact-checking Over 12,000 of Donald Trump’s Statements About Immigration

Donald Trump knows how important his words about unauthorized immigrants are.

“Migrant criminals.” “Illegal monster.” “Killers.” “Gang members.” “Poisoning our country.” “Taking your jobs.” “The largest invasion in the history of our country.”

Repetition has been core to Trump’s speech throughout his political career. The Marshall Project used text analysis to identify 13 major claims about immigration in over 350,000 of Trump’s public statements from Factba.se, some of which Trump has made 500 times or more. All of them are untrue or deeply misleading.

Research has shown that as someone hears a statement more times, it feels more true.

Millions of Americans and people worldwide have heard these claims. Here they are, fact-checked by the staff of The Marshall Project.

For Donald Trump, immigrants bring crime. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he said during his 2015 campaign announcement. “They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists, and some, I assume, are good people.”

But immigration in the U.S. is strongly associated with lower crime. Looking at data from 200 metropolitan areas, a 2017 study found immigrants are “less likely to offend than native born Americans” and “for property crimes, immigration has a consistently negative effect” on a region’s crime rate. That trend, National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) research found, has been consistent all the way back to 1870.

Those findings hold true for undocumented immigrants. Using estimates of undocumented populations, researchers in 2018 found that “undocumented immigration does not increase violence.” Similarly, a study published one year earlier asserted undocumented immigrants have lower rates of drug arrests, overdoses and drunk driving offenses than native-born Americans.

Why do immigrants commit fewer crimes? One theory is that the type of person willing to pack up their entire life to seek prosperity in America is also the type of person unwilling to put all of that at risk through criminal behavior, according to a 2007 NBER paper.

While first-generation immigrants generally display lower levels of criminality, their descendants tend to behave more and more like the greater U.S. population as their families assimilate. “By the second generation, immigrants have simply caught up to their native-born counterparts,” reads a 2014 study.

Trump’s oft-repeated assertion that immigrants make crime worse is shared by around half of Americans, according to a 2023 survey — a number relatively consistent with when Pew started asking the question nearly a quarter-century ago. Only 5% of respondents thought immigrants reduce crime.

Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that millions of immigrants crossing the southern U.S. border were intentionally released from overseas jails, prisons and asylums, especially in countries like Venezuela.

These claims have been routinely debunked by journalists, researchers and fact-checkers. Pressed multiple times, Trump’s campaign has not been able to corroborate the claims, making it difficult to fact-check something that may not exist.

A kernel of truth driving Trump’s claim is that federal officials say they’ve encountered Venezuelan gang members crossing the southern border, though in nowhere near the numbers the former president is pushing. And there’s no evidence they were incarcerated or systematically released, intentionally or otherwise, to infiltrate the U.S.

Criminology and immigration experts, both inside and outside of Venezuela, told El País, the largest daily Spanish-language newspaper in the world, that there’s been no emptying of prisons and mental institutions. Meanwhile, Trump has exaggerated and misattributed the country’s decline in violent crime. A 2023 annual report on violence from an alliance of Venezuelan universities links a more modest 25% decline in violence to peace agreements between organized gangs and fewer opportunities for crime amid a suffering economy. The report does say outward migration of youth gangs temporarily drove up violence in neighboring countries.

Republicans echo Trump’s accusations. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott proclaimed the border a disaster less than five months into the Biden administration. Last month, Abbott amended that proclamation to label Tren de Aragua — the Venezuelan gang at the heart of Trump’s unfounded claim — a terrorist organization.

Donald Trump has claimed that Mexico is flooding the border with drug dealers, criminals and rapists by repeating emotionally powerful anecdotes. Two weeks after his 2015 presidential campaign announcement, Trump latched onto a poster child: Jose Garcia-Zarate, a five-times deported Mexican national who was charged with murder for fatally shooting 32-year-old Kate Steinle on a pier in San Francisco. She died in her father’s arms.

Trump repeatedly invoked Steinle’s killing as part of an immigrant crime wave and said that he is “the only one who can fix it.”

Trump’s focus on Garcia-Zarate is part of a pattern of highlighting undocumented people of color killing or raping White women: Lakin Riley, Jocelyn Nungaray, Rachel Morin and Marilyn Pharis.

While each of these violent crimes is tragic, multiple studies have shown there is no crime wave: Documented and undocumented immigrants commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans. Individual cases of violence can always be found within a population of some 11 million undocumented immigrants, said César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, a professor at the Moritz School of Law.

These individual stories “serve as useful rallying points around which his supporters and members of the right-wing media ecosystem are willing to devote immense amounts of time,” García Hernández said.

And some of Trump’s cases aren’t what he claims they are. A jury acquitted Garcia-Zarate of murder, finding the gun went off by accident and ricocheted off the pier before killing Steinle. Trump called it “a disgraceful verdict” and tweeted, “BUILD THE WALL!”

Steinle’s family did not appreciate the attention. “For Donald Trump, we were just what he needed — beautiful girl, San Francisco, illegal immigrant, arrested a million times, a violent crime and yadda, yadda, yadda,” Liz Sullivan, Steinle’s mother, told the San Francisco Chronicle. “We were the perfect storm for that man.”

Federal law prohibits noncitizens from voting in federal elections and the available evidence shows attempts to get around the law are vanishingly rare.

State-level reviews of voter rolls have routinely found negligible numbers of noncitizens attempting or successfully registering to vote. For example, earlier this year in Ohio, about 600 noncitizens were found to have registered to vote. Of those, about 138 are believed to have cast a ballot, representing about 0.002% of the state’s registered voters. Similarly, in August, a yearslong review in Texas found about 2,000 “potential” noncitizens with voting histories on Texas voter rolls — or 0.01% of the electorate — but to date, none have been accused of voting illegally.

Republicans have still tried to tighten voter registration laws, specifically the 2024 SAVE Act legislation, which would force states to verify citizenship before adding someone to the voter rolls, an effort that Democrats have stymied to this point.

Another version of Trump’s argument is that pro-immigrant efforts by Democrats pad the census counts of Democrat-majority districts and give the party an advantage in House representation and the Electoral College. Trump ally Elon Musk has repeatedly echoed this claim, falsely claiming that Democrats have gained as many as 20 seats in the House due to illegal immigration.

Multiple analyses have found that illegal immigration is responsible for between 0 and 1 additional Democratic representatives in the House based on the 2020 census. Additionally, at the statewide level, noncitizen arrivals have been concentrated in Republican-leaning states since 2019, according to an analysis by the Cato Institute.

Although there is no single definition for a “sanctuary city,” Donald Trump is broadly referring to states or municipalities that choose not to cooperate with federal immigration authorities to arrest or detain people suspected of violating the country’s immigration laws. It’s a movement that traces its origins back to the 1980s, when churches banded together to shelter refugees fleeing violence in El Salvador and Guatemala. These religious communities offered migrants protection in open defiance of the federal government.

Trump’s claims that these policies lead to increased crime by undocumented immigrants are central to the larger debate over whether the sanctuary movement threatens the safety of the local communities embracing it.

Research shows that there is no link between sanctuary policies and rising crime rates. There are numerous studies that reach the same conclusion using various types of statistical research methods. Instead, researchers find that migrants are less likely to commit crimes than their native-born counterparts.

A 2017 study found that, across 107 U.S. cities, homicide and robbery rates tended to drop as the number of undocumented immigrants from Mexico increased, but only in sanctuary cities. One theory explaining why is that sanctuary policies allow undocumented immigrants to interact with law enforcement without fear of deportation, producing “a spiral of trust that supports police and raises informal social control over crime.”

At rally after rally, Donald Trump asks the crowd if they want to hear the poem “The Snake” and the audience roars. A Marshall Project analysis estimates he has read or referenced the poem at least three dozen times.

The poem is actually the lyrics of a song based on one of Aesop’s fables, in which a tender-hearted woman picks up a frozen snake and warms it. When it’s revived, the snake repays her kindness with a poisonous bite. She asks him why he would kill her and the snake replies, “You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in.” In a speech in South Carolina, Trump told the crowd the lyrics were pertinent in light of “people coming into our country who are going to cause tremendous problems.”

Misinformation can come in the form of outright lies, but also in the less tangible, and more difficult to fact-check, medium of a metaphor. A 2018 academic paper analyzed Trump’s use of metaphor and found he frequently evoked the image of immigrants as animals. “He uses this metaphor to present himself as a hero, as someone who will protect you from these animals,” a study author told Frontline.

Ironically, the song was written by civil rights activist and musician Oscar Brown Jr. Brown, who wrote essays against racism, ran as a progressive candidate in Illinois and for a brief time joined the Communist Party.

In an interview, Brown’s daughter Africa Brown said her father was “never against immigrants” and said, “Trump is the living embodiment of the snake that my father wrote about in that song.”

Donald Trump’s assertions that members of Hamas, ISIS and other extremist groups are entering the country as refugees to conduct acts of terrorism largely don’t hold up to reality. Historically, most perpetrators of terror attacks have been U.S.-born citizens or permanent legal residents from countries not part of the Trump administration’s “Muslim ban,” which restricted travel from seven predominantly Muslim countries.

A 2023 Cato Institute analysis found that the annual odds of an American being murdered in a terrorist attack by a refugee is one in 3.3 billion. The likelihood of being killed in a terrorist attack by any foreigner is one in 4.3 million, and the chance of being killed in a terrorist attack committed by an undocumented immigrant is “zero.”

According to a 2015 Migration Policy Institute article examining nearly 800,000 resettled refugees since Sept. 11, 2001, only three — two Iraqi and one Uzbek — have been arrested for planning terror attacks: Two were to take place abroad, and one was “barely credible.” However, the following year, a Somali refugee in Ohio stabbed 13 people (none of whom died).

After Israel’s invasion and bombardment of Gaza in response to Hamas’ attack that killed almost 1,200 Israelis and took over 250 hostages last year, Trump claimed, without evidence, that the “same people” behind the attack in Israel were entering the U.S. through “our totally open southern border.” Palestinians in Gaza largely cannot escape the war outside the strip’s borders because of Israel’s land, sea and air blockade. The main U.N. agency settling Palestinian refugees does not refer them to the U.S. The number of Palestinian refugees going through other countries, and referred to the U.S. by nongovernmental organizations, is quite small and subject to rigorous vetting to identify anyone posing “security risks.” According to the State Department, fewer than 600 Palestinians have come to the U.S. as refugees in the last decade. In the 2023 fiscal year, out of more than 60,000 total refugees accepted by the U.S., only 56 were Palestinian.

Donald Trump often repeats that undocumented immigrants put a financial burden on American taxpayers by taking advantage of public welfare benefits. “Illegal immigration costs the United States more than 200 Billion Dollars a year. How was this allowed to happen?” he wrote on X, formerly Twitter, in 2018.

Undocumented immigrants are able to use some public services. Undocumented children can receive public education. And the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), provides items like baby formula to low-income parents, including undocumented ones. However, fear often keeps undocumented immigrants from taking advantage of their benefits. After Trump took office, many undocumented families withdrew from WIC for fear of being detected and deported.

Undocumented immigrants are ineligible for many other public benefits. Undocumented people can pay into Social Security and unemployment insurance, but are unable to access them themselves.

This is in contrast to veterans, who have benefits like the Veterans Health Administration, the GI bill to pay for education and specialized loan assistance programs.

A report from the Cato Institute argued that undocumented immigrants could be a net benefit to public coffers because they tend to pay more in taxes than they consume in government services.

Undocumented people contribute to the American economy by working, earning income and paying sales, income and payroll taxes, including through automatic paycheck withholdings or by using taxpayer identification numbers instead of Social Security numbers. Again, fear and lack of information about the tax preparation process often keeps undocumented people from receiving tax credits they may otherwise qualify for.

According to a study by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, undocumented immigrants paid nearly $100 billion in 2022 in federal, state and local taxes.

On the night Kamala Harris accepted the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, Donald Trump claimed, if given the chance, she would “allow more than 100 million illegal aliens into our country.”

Although Trump says Democratic politicians like Harris support “open borders,” both Harris’ presidential platform and the Biden administration’s current policies advocate for strong border enforcement.

Since becoming the Democratic nominee, Harris has called for stricter asylum rules and vowed to prosecute drug-smuggling gangs. “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 said during a recent visit to the border town of Douglas, Arizona.

In some ways, the Biden administration carried over Trump’s immigration policies. Both administrations enforced Title 42, a pandemic-related policy allowing Border Patrol agents to turn away migrants on the grounds of preventing the spread of COVID-19.

After Title 42 was lifted last May, the State Department clarified this change “does not mean the border is open.” Instead, immigration rules reverted to Title 8, which imposes harsher penalties for illegal border crossings, such as deportation and a five-year ban on reentry — consequences not enforced under Title 42.

However, border crossings continued to rise and, earlier this year, President Joe Biden issued an executive order stopping the government from processing asylum requests when Border Patrol’s daily number of encounters with “removable noncitizens” averages more than 2,500 over the course of a week. Harris has pledged to reduce that limit to 1,500 per week.

Biden’s order mandates deportation for anyone denied asylum, which exposes them to criminal charges and a long-term ban on reentering the U.S. A month after the order, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported the lowest arrest levels since September 2020, with a 32% decrease in illegal crossings.

Donald Trump often points to the 1950s-era immigration policies of then-President Dwight Eisenhower when discussing his plans for mass deportations of migrants.

“He moved out 1.5 million people and brought them back to where they came from,” Trump said during a 2015 interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity.

Operation Wetback, Eisenhower’s military-style deportation operation targeting undocumented immigrants, whose name comes from an anti-Latino slur, has been an inspiration for the former president and current presidential candidate. “We’re rounding them up in a very humane way, a very nice way,” Trump told “60 Minutes” in 2015. When asked to elaborate, he referred to deportations under the Eisenhower administration.

But despite Trump’s sympathetic characterization of Operation Wetback, historians widely describe it as inhumane. It’s not just that the deportations also ensnared U.S. citizens. Historian Mae Ngai wrote that, in one roundup, 88 migrants died of sunstroke. Ngai also pointed to a congressional investigation comparing conditions on a boat used for deportations to an “eighteenth century slave ship.” Many who survived the voyage were displaced to unfamiliar locations within Mexico.

Historians also contest the number of people deported. After the 1954 initiative, officials reported over a million migrant apprehensions and expulsions. But researcher Kelly Lytle Hernández’s review of records shows apprehensions and expulsions fell closer to 250,000. Hernández argues that the initiative’s results, much touted by officials, were “less than they were portrayed to be.”

Still, she wrote, that “does not render the summer of 1954 meaningless” because it directed greater public attention to the United States’ ongoing push to exert increasing control over its southern border.

During Donald Trump’s presidential run in 2015, he told rallygoers, “They’re taking our jobs.” At the time, the amorphous “they” were people from Mexico. And the jobs were manufacturing jobs.

This election cycle, Trump still says “they” are taking our jobs. This time, the meaning of “they” has evolved to encompass anyone who enters the U.S. illegally, and the jobs are what Trump has repeatedly called “Black jobs” and union jobs, reflecting two groups of potential voters the former president is courting.

When Trump’s original claims surfaced, the Urban Institute noted that while immigrants were increasingly filling low-skilled, low-wage jobs here, the types of jobs were different from jobs native-born Americans did. Immigrant workers, especially those with less education, worked as maids, house cleaners, cooks and in agricultural jobs. Similar native-born workers were cashiers, sales clerks and janitors. Zooming out, a 2007 National Bureau of Economic Research study found that the last large wave of immigration led to a dip in employment for Black people at lower skill levels and, perhaps, higher incarceration rates.

In a September speech, Trump said that “Kamala Harris’ border invasion is also crushing the jobs and wages of African American workers and Hispanic American workers, and also union members.” It’s true that Black workers have largely had lower wages and higher unemployment rates than White workers for decades, due to discrimination and other barriers. In recent years, Black workers and all low-wage workers have seen their paychecks grow, driven by state-level boosts to minimum wage, and wage growth for Black workers from 2019 to 2023 outpaced White workers.

When it comes to union jobs, until the early 2000s, modern labor and manufacturing unions were staunchly anti-immigration but flipped that stance and supported amnesty policies. A widely circulated paper from the Cato Institute found a link between increases in immigration in general — whether legal or not — and a drop in unionization.

Building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border has been a centerpiece of Donald Trump’s immigration policy. He argues it’s effective at curbing illegal border crossings and that Mexico can cover the construction costs.

But the reality of building a wall at the border is more complex and its efficacy is dubious.

According to a Government Accountability Office report, from 2017 through January 2021, the Trump administration added about 450 miles of barriers along the over-1,900-mile expanse. But 81% of the new structures replaced old ones. Government officials and others “noted that the barriers led to various impacts, including to cultural resources, water sources, and endangered species, and from erosion,” the report said. Also, because of the wall, people are more likely to try to cross at more dangerous points, contributing to more injuries and deaths.

Historically, many undocumented immigrants have come into the country legally and overstayed their visas, something a wall wouldn’t prevent. Additionally, people have found ways of circumventing the wall with tunnels and even a hidden rail system.

A review by The Washington Post of Customs and Border Protection records found smuggling gangs had sawed through the wall 3,272 times from 2019 to 2021, usually cutting it “with inexpensive power tools widely available at retail hardware stores.”

Thus far, despite Trump’s promises, Mexico has not covered the nearly $20-million-per-mile expense of building a border wall.

Fact-check by Daphne Duret

During a recent presidential debate against Kamala Harris, Donald Trump made some shocking claims about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio.

“They’re eating the dogs. The people that came in,” he said. “They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in our country. And it’s a shame.”

Trump’s assertions about migrants eating pets drew further attention to other claims he and his vice presidential running mate, Sen. JD Vance, made: that migrants were in the U.S. illegally and that their presence had led to an increase in both crime and communicable diseases.

In a statement, Springfield spokesperson Karen Graves asserted “that there have been no credible reports or specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community.”

In a post on Springfield’s website, city leaders refuted claims about the city’s Haitian population committing high levels of crime or being undocumented. An August report from health officials in Clark County, where Springfield is the largest city, showed that, excluding COVID, infectious disease case counts in the county remained relatively similar to a decade ago, well before Springfield’s influx of Haitian migrants began.

Police body camera video purportedly showing a Haitian woman eating a cat in Springfield was ultimately determined to be an incident involving a U.S.-born American woman from Canton, Ohio, a nearly three-hour drive from Springfield. The woman was arrested on animal cruelty charges and her attorney requested she undergo a mental health evaluation. A similar story falsely claiming a Haitian migrant had captured a pair of endangered geese has also been debunked.

Similar tales of Haitian migrants eating cats and dogs date back to the 1980s, when it became a popular insult against Haitian American youth in places like South Florida. Haitians are not alone in being targeted with these types of rumors. Other migrant populations, including people from Asia, have been accused of using pets for food.

Kamala Harris: A more positive tone, backs tough policies

Reporters also searched for and reviewed Vice President Kamala Harris’ public statements about immigration. Since the Factba.se database is focused on presidential candidates, data for Harris was limited to the time since she became the Democratic nominee in July, resulting in far fewer statements than what was available for Trump. What statements there were, though, indicated a more positive tone toward immigration and those seeking asylum in the U.S.

“Innocent people.” “Children who had fled incredible violence.” “Displaced.” “Dreamers.” “Families.” “Muslim brothers and sisters.” “We’re all immigrants.”

While Harris frequently references her record of prosecuting transnational gangs, drug cartels and human traffickers, she also supports the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA), and a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants: “Let’s bring all of these folks out of the shadows into the sunlight, and be true to the value that we have as a country.”

Still, as vice president, she has expressed what experts call the party’s toughest approach to immigration in a generation. Though these measures fall far short of Trump’s extreme proposals like mass deportations, they include increased border enforcement, raising the bar for asylum, and expanding immigrant detention centers.

Harris also often cites a tough border security bill she supported. The bill would have increased funding for border personnel, shut loopholes related to the asylum system, reduced the ability of migrants to temporarily enter the country, and given more discretion to the president to close down the border. Trump derailed the bill, in part because its passage would “make things much better for the opposing side.”

“Our administration worked on the most significant border security bill in decades. Some of the most conservative Republicans in Washington, D.C., supported the bill. Even the Border Patrol endorsed it. It was all set to pass. But at the last minute, Trump directed his allies in the Senate to vote it down,” said Harris.

The harm of repeating the false link between immigration and crime

Even recognizing that a statement is false becomes more difficult when someone repeatedly hears false information.

In what cognitive scientists call the “illusory truth effect,” the more someone hears a statement, the more likely they are to believe it. A leading explanation for the phenomenon is that repetition makes information easier to process, making it seem more truthful. A 2021 study found that even as the greatest increase in perceived truth happened when subjects heard a piece of information a second time, subjects reported perceptions of truth increased with repetition up to nine times, and didn’t decrease with further repetition.

Falsely linking immigration and crime has resulted in real policies. These include Secure Communities, a Department of Homeland Security Program that flags immigrants in local law enforcement custody for deportation, and the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s 287(g) program, which delegates some immigration enforcement tasks to local law enforcement.

“None of them delivered the increased public safety that was promised,” said Charis Kubrin, a professor of criminology, law and society at the University of California, Irvine. “Why? Because immigrant criminality was not a problem to begin with.”

According to Kubrin, this focus shifts attention and resources from other public safety concerns such as mass shootings, violence against women and crimes with broad economic impact like fraud, corporate negligence and failure in regulation.

Discrediting election results

Claims about immigration and crime can also strengthen attempts to discredit the results of the 2020 general election, and potentially, the 2024 general election.

Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia accepted the 2020 election results while raising concerns about noncitizen voting. While campaigning for Trump during the 2024 election, Youngkin highlighted his state’s purging of 6,303 names recorded as noncitizens from voter rolls. Election administrators say these registrations are often the result of errors when filling out paperwork and there are no records of noncitizens casting votes, and few instances of illegal voting in general. Youngkin’s registration removals now face a federal lawsuit.

In Texas, the right-wing group True the Vote has led a campaign to challenge voter registrations in the state, leaving election officials to process thousands of challenges while ensuring that voters aren’t improperly removed. While most of the Texas challenges are over the residence of the voter, the group behind the challenges has stoked claims of noncitizen voting.

True the Vote, and other groups have also challenged registrations in states like Arizona, California, Georgia, Michigan and Pennsylvania. The challenges are often based on name-matching software that has known issues with data quality and usability. This comes after activists pushed Republican-led states to leave the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), a partnership of state election administrators that many regarded as the most rigorous system for helping states maintain up-to-date voter rolls.

Normalizing hardline policies

Scholars have noted the cumulative effect of scapegoating immigration. Trump’s rhetoric helped shift the window of acceptable language, and policy, toward immigrants, making controversial practices like family separation or mass deportation more palatable, Laura Finley and Luigi Esposito, sociology and criminology professors at Barry University, wrote in a 2020 article.

In 2018, researchers reviewed available studies on policies that limited local cooperation with immigration enforcement, often referred to as “sanctuary” policies, and found there was little evidence that linked such policies, or immigration overall, to more crime. The researchers concluded that linking immigration and crime allows xenophobia and racism to be expressed under a “color-blind” concept of “rule-of-law.”

Polls show more Americans favor fewer immigrants and more restrictions on immigration. A July Gallup poll found that 55% of respondents wanted a decrease in immigration. The poll, which has asked about immigration levels since 1965, has not found such a high level of those who wanted decreased immigration in nearly two decades. Other 2024 polls also show support for tougher border measures and that many Americans find immigration to be a key problem facing the country.

The same poll shows broad support for tougher immigration measures. A majority of those polled support temporarily halting migrants from seeking asylum at the Southwest border, hiring more border patrol agents and expanding walls at that border. Nearly half support deporting all immigrants in the country illegally. Despite this, large majorities also supported some path to citizenship for those in the country without authorization. Support for the restrictive measures rose from five years ago while support for pathways to citizenship for undocumented immigrants fell.

Polling also shows support for tougher state immigration policy. An August poll found 63% of polled Arizona voters supported Proposition 314, a ballot measure before voters in the November 2024 election. The measure would make crossing the border with Mexico outside ports of entry a state crime, allowing state and local police to arrest migrants for the new crime.

The effects of repeating a lie

Beyond Trump, there is a growing partisan divide around the way politicians talk about immigrants. In a 2022 article published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers describe how they analyzed over 200,000 U.S. congressional speeches and 5,000 presidential communications on immigration since the late 1800s. While there has been a general trend toward more positive language on immigration, Republicans are more likely than Democrats to use words like “crime,” “legality” and “threat” and to use dehumanizing language, the researchers found.

Politicians across parties and nations continue to reap rewards by blaming immigrants for social problems. “Politicians, from far-right populists to centrist liberals, use anti-immigrant narratives to deflect attention from deeper systematic issues such as affordable housing shortages, economic inequalities and failing public services,” Yvonne Su, director of the Centre for Refugee Studies at York University, wrote last month.

For Alex Piquero, a University of Miami criminology professor and former director of the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, the body of research is “absolutely clear” that immigrants are not responsible for increases in crime.

But beliefs to the contrary are persistent. “What we have here is a mismatch between what the data show and what the political rhetoric says,“ Piquero said.

Trump seems confident in the power of repetition. “I could get elected twice over the wall,” he said in a speech at CPAC in 2020. That didn’t happen that year. Will it happen in November?

This story was updated to omit the minimum number that some claims are repeated.

Learn about how The Marshall Project is covering the 2024 election’s criminal justice and immigration issues across the U.S. and in our local news teams’ cities.