CNN
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The second day of the Republican National Convention began in Milwaukee.
CNN’s Facts First team is fact-checking the tournament and will update this page throughout the night.
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise said Tuesday that the migrants were being purposefully released from prisons to arrive in the U.S.
“On the border, Biden and Harris have opened the border to the whole world. The prisons are emptying,” said Scalise, a Louisiana Republican.
Facts first: There is no evidence to support Scalise’s claim that he would “empty prisons” so prisoners could cross into the United States as immigrants.
“I search the news every day to see what’s going on in prisons around the world, and I’ve never seen any evidence that any country is emptying their prisons and sending everyone to the US,” said Helen Fair, co-author of the World Prison Population List, which tracks the world’s prison population, and a research fellow at Birkbeck’s Institute of Crime and Justice Policy Studies.
Trump, now the Republican presidential nominee, has made similar claims repeatedly in his speeches and interviews, but has never provided any evidence to back up his claims.
The Trump campaign provided CNN with only a vague reference to a 2022 article from the right-wing website Breitbart about a federal intelligence report that allegedly warned Border Patrol agents that Venezuela had released violent prisoners who then joined the migrant caravan.
But this claim about Venezuela’s actions has never been corroborated, and experts told CNN, PolitiFact and FactCheck.org that they are not aware of any evidence that such a thing happened.
According to the World Prison Population List, the recorded global prison population increased from approximately 10.77 million to approximately 10.99 million between October 2021 and April 2024.
Daniel Dale of CNN
Rep. Elise Stefanik, D-New York, argued in a speech at the Republican National Convention on Tuesday that Biden’s presidency has delivered the “highest inflation rate” of her lifetime.
Facts first: This claim is outdated.
Year-over-year inflation in June 2022 was about 9.1%, the highest since late 1981, but inflation has fallen sharply since its peak during the Biden administration, with inflation at about 3% in June 2024, the most recent available rate. This rate was surpassed as recently as 2011.
Stefanik was born in 1984.
Daniel Dale and Piper Hudspeth Blackburn, CNN
Wisconsin Senate candidate exaggerates fentanyl deaths
Republican Rep. Eric Hovde, who is running for Senate in Wisconsin, argued in a speech at the Republican National Convention on Tuesday that the Biden administration is “empowering drug cartels, putting fentanyl on our streets and killing more than 100,000 Americans each year” by opening up the southern border and allowing “criminals and terrorists into the country.”
Facts first: It’s a gross exaggeration to say that fentanyl kills more than 100,000 Americans each year because of the country’s “open” borders: Estimates and preliminary data put the number of overdose deaths from synthetic opioids, including fentanyl, in 2023 at about 75,000.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in May that roughly 107,500 people have died from drug overdoses in the United States, a total that includes people who have died from overdoses of any type of drug.
Synthetic opioids, including fentanyl, are responsible for the majority of these deaths, accounting for about 70% of overdose deaths in 2023, but not all of them.
In fact, there were approximately 1,500 fewer overdose deaths from fentanyl and other synthetic opioids in 2023 compared to 2022. Deaths from psychostimulants such as cocaine and methamphetamines are estimated to increase in 2023.
Specifically, there will be 74,702 synthetic opioid deaths in 2023, most of which were caused by fentanyl. By comparison, the estimated number for 2022 was 76,226, according to the CDC.
In addition, fentanyl For the most part The drugs were smuggled by U.S. citizens through legal ports of entry, not sneaked into the country by migrants. Contrary to what Republicans often claim, the border is not “open.” Under the Biden administration, Border Patrol has seized increasing amounts of illicit fentanyl, numbering in the hundreds of millions of pills.
From CNN’s Jen Christensen
Kali Lake said Tuesday that Arizona Rep. Ruben Gallego, Democrat and likely opponent in the state’s U.S. Senate race this fall, voted last week to allow undocumented immigrants “to vote illegally in the upcoming election.”
“These people have their heads full of bad ideas,” Lake said in his speech. “Just last week, Ruben Gallego voted to give millions of people who came into this country illegally the right to vote in the upcoming elections.”
Facts first: This claim is false.
The House of Representatives did not vote on whether to allow foreign nationals to vote. The House passed a bill on July 10 that would require proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote in federal elections. Gallego voted against the bill, but it is not expected to be taken up by the Democratic-controlled Senate.
It is already illegal for foreigners to vote in federal elections, and experts say it rarely happens. To register to vote, people must provide their driver’s license or Social Security number, which is checked against existing databases to verify their identity. Voters must swear, under penalty of perjury, that they are U.S. citizens. Foreigners who vote illegally can be subject to imprisonment or deportation.
In a statement, Gallego said he opposes the bill because “this bill’s sole purpose is to disenfranchise tens of thousands of Arizonans, and I will not vote to disenfranchise Arizonans to stop something that is already illegal.”
“Of course, only American citizens can vote,” Gallego said, “but this bill does more to make it harder for married women, military personnel, Native Arizonans, seniors, people with disabilities and other Arizonans to vote.”
Via CNN’s Piper Hudspeth Blackburn
Perry Johnson, a Michigan business owner who once ran for governor and president, said Tuesday that his income had steadily increased under former President Donald Trump.
“Household incomes have increased every year under the Trump administration. That’s a fact,” Johnson told the audience.
Facts first: Johnson is wrong: Median household income fell during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, both after and after adjusting for inflation.
The typical household income, before adjusting for inflation, grew by several thousand dollars each year of Trump’s first three years in office, but fell by $1,660 in 2020 as the pandemic devastated the U.S. economy.
Taking inflation into account, the typical household income fell by about $2,900 in 2020 after increasing each of the first three years of the Trump administration.
From CNN’s Tami Ruby
In a video played at the start of the Republican National Committee’s proceedings Tuesday night, a narrator said, “This isn’t just a big city problem. Rising crime is a problem everywhere.”
Facts First: The claim that “rising crime” is a problem “everywhere” is false. Both violent and property crimes Significant decline in the US in 2023 and Q1 2024, Although some regions saw increases.
Preliminary FBI data for 2023 shows that homicides are down about 13% nationwide and overall violent crime is down about 6% nationwide compared to 2022, with both homicide and violent crime levels below President Trump’s final calendar year in office in 2020. Preliminary FBI data for the first quarter of 2024 also shows even sharper declines, with homicides down about 26% and overall violent crime down about 15% compared to the same quarter in 2023.
The data released by the FBI comes from local law enforcement agencies, and the figures are preliminary, not all communities submitted data, and the data that is submitted usually contains initial errors, so these statistics may not accurately represent the magnitude of the recent crime decline. But it is clear from these statistics and other data sources that crime has certainly declined to some degree nationwide, but not everywhere.
Jeff Asher, co-founder of AH Datalytics and a crime data expert, said that if the final 2023 statistics show murders down at least 10% from 2022, it would be the fastest decline in the U.S. “on record.” He also noted that preliminary data for the first quarter of 2024 released by the FBI and “crime data collected from multiple independent sources indicate further significant declines in property and violent crimes, including a significant decline in murders so far this year compared to 2023, but there is still time left in the year for these trends to change.”
Daniel Dale of CNN
