Joe Biden and Donald Trump exchanged barbs Thursday during the first televised debate of the election campaign. AFP verified some of the candidates’ claims on key issues.
Migrants
Trump falsely claimed that under President Joe Biden, “we no longer have borders,” and that “because of his ridiculous, insane, very stupid policies, people are coming in and killing our citizens on a level that we have never seen.”
Faced with criticism of the record number of migrant arrivals in the United States, Joe Biden signed an executive order in early June, temporarily closing the border with Mexico as soon as a daily limit is reached.
This amounts to “increased surveillance at the border,” according to Nicole Hallett, director of the Center for Immigrant Rights at the University of Chicago.
Despite some high-profile incidents, including the murder of a student in Georgia, there is “no evidence” of the wave of immigration crime described by Trump, she told AFP, noting that “criminality is declining across the country, although immigration has increased.”
Violent and property crime are near their lowest levels in decades, according to the FBI’s 2022 data, the most recent available.
“The overwhelming majority of violent crimes are committed by citizens” of the United States, said Jeffrey Fagan, professor at Columbia University.
A Cato Institute report released this week showed that immigrants were proportionally less likely to be convicted of murder in 2022 than American citizens.
According to Michelle Mittelstadt, communications director for the Migration Policy Institute, there is no evidence to support the claims Donald Trump repeated during the debate that prisoners and people living in psychiatric facilities are streaming in from the Mexican border.
Inflation
Donald Trump and Joe Biden have been passing the buck over who is responsible for soaring inflation.
Joe Biden “caused inflation — I left him a country with virtually no inflation,” the billionaire lamented after reciting his favorite — but false — line about how his presidency created the largest economy in U.S. history.
The current president has claimed that his Republican predecessor “decimated the economy” during his four years in the White House.
Both candidates are misleading by omitting the impact of COVID-19 on the economy.
At the end of Donald Trump’s term, almost a year after the COVID-19 crisis began, inflation was around 1.4%.
It began its rise in spring 2021, reaching 9.1% in June 2022, its highest level in almost 40 years. It then slowly fell again, and is today around 3%, still higher than the 2% targeted by the American central bank (Fed).
Several factors related to the pandemic are at fault, including the billions of dollars injected by the aid plans of the Trump and then Biden administrations, the difficulties encountered in the global supply chain, and the war in Ukraine.
Storming of the Capitol
Donald Trump has tried to dodge the accusations he faces over the events of January 6, 2021, when hundreds of his supporters stormed the Capitol in Washington to try to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s victory. The former president blamed Democrat Nancy Pelosi, the top congresswoman at the time.
“I offered her 10,000 troops or the National Guard, and she refused,” he falsely said.
Nancy Pelosi would not even have had the power to reject the deployment of the National Guard if Donald Trump had decided to do so, several experts pointed out to AFP.
The Washington National Guard division says it takes orders “solely from the president,” according to its website.
The House inquiry into the Capitol assault wrote in its final report that Donald Trump “never gave the order to deploy the National Guard” to prevent the disturbances.
Donald Trump also reiterated that the 2020 presidential election, lost to Joe Biden, had been marred by “aberrant” fraud. Unfounded accusations that have since been refuted, particularly in court.