The weekslong partial government shutdown has led to around 800,000 federal employees not working or working without pay. It also has led to some false or questionable claims from Democrats about the shutdown’s impact on a host of federal services.
President Donald Trump falsely claimed that El Paso went from “one of the most dangerous cities in the country to one of the safest cities in the country overnight” after “a wall was put up” along the Mexico border.
On the same day ISIS claimed responsibility for a deadly attack against U.S. service members in Syria, Vice President Mike Pence declared that ISIS “has been defeated.” It is true that the U.S. and its allies have retaken virtually all of the land ISIS controlled in Iraq and Syria, but experts say the group still has tens of thousands of fighters and remains dangerous.
President Donald Trump, who campaigned on a promise that Mexico would pay for a border wall, now misleadingly claims he never meant that Mexico would “write out a check” to pay for it. His campaign at least twice laid out specific methods of direct payment.
Under President Trump’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2018, there would have been hundreds of billions of dollars in deficits each year from 2018 to 2027, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. That contradicts White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney’s claim that the U.S. “would actually be on a glide path to balancing the budget” under the plan.
In this video, we review four statements President Donald Trump made during his national address on illegal immigration and the need for Congress to appropriate $5.7 billion for a wall along the Southwest border.
In a national address, President Donald Trump called on Congress to provide $5.7 billion for a border wall to address what he called a “crisis” on the border. The president made some false and misleading claims, and provided some facts without context.
U.S. Border Patrol encountered 6,259 immigrants with criminal convictions, many of them for illegal entry charges, in fiscal 2018, according to the most recent statistics. Yet, White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney misleadingly claimed authorities “had arrested 17,000 criminals at the southern border.”
The RNC attacks a “Pelosi plan” as “immoral” because it “would spend $54 billion taxpayer dollars on foreign countries” but not address “the border crisis.” Yet that’s the same amount that Republican-controlled appropriations committees approved in June for the State Department’s operations, which includes foreign aid.
Democrats say the Trump administration is asking for more money for a border wall even though it has spent only 6 percent of the funds that Congress has appropriated for border security over the past two years. That’s misleading. About 60 percent has been awarded to contracts.