News Reporter: Fact Checker: Trump’s whoppers go south of the border

Friday, 5 April 2019

Fact Checker: Trump’s whoppers go south of the border

Democracy Dies in Darkness

The truth behind the rhetoric

Trump's whoppers go south of the border

President Trump threatened to close the U.S.-Mexico border, complaining that Mexico doesn't stop Central American migrants who are heading in droves to the United States. Mexico has the toughest immigration laws in the world, Trump added.

But shortly thereafter, Trump began to retreat from his threat, claiming that Mexico suddenly had started to detain thousands of migrants along its southern border this week. "They're really apprehending thousands of people," Trump said. "And it's the first time, really, in decades that this has taken place. And it should have taken place a long time ago."

These claims are not just false — they're absurd. We gave them Four Pinocchios. In a rare move, the president himself responded to our fact-check on Twitter.

Mexico has deported Guatemalans, Hondurans and Salvadorans more than 2.15 million times since 2001, according to Mexico's Department of the Interior. Mexican immigration authorities detained migrants from these three hot-spot countries 886,640 times from 2011 through February. Fifty-three percent of these encounters happened at the four Mexican states that border Central America: Campeche, Chiapas, Quintana Roo and Tabasco. These are huge numbers!

Trump's claim that Mexico has the strongest immigration laws in the world is just as easily debunked. Mexico does impose penalties and deport unauthorized migrants, but it decriminalized the act of crossing the border in 2011. Contrast that with the United States — where unauthorized entry is a misdemeanor for first-time offenders and a felony for repeat offenders — and Trump's claim falls apart.

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Mulvaney's magic numbers on Obamacare

Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, went on the Sunday shows and made a simple comparison. He said more people paid a fine for not having health insurance than people who gained from the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare.

The health care law at first imposed a financial penalty each year — called the "individual mandate" — on individuals who did not have health insurance. Mulvaney claimed that "tens of millions of people" were paying a fine. But that's just not the case.

And his math seems to be seriously flawed. Using conservative estimates, it appears that 7.7 percent of the population gained coverage from Obamacare, versus 3.3 percent or fewer who incurred "individual mandate" penalties before the tax was reduced to $0 for 2019.

It's the kind of fuzzy math that merits Four Pinocchios.

Important cat news

Readers often tell us they love the weekly cat GIFs in this newsletter. (Some don't like them. That's their right.)

This news is for all the cat fans out there: You may be shocked to learn that the USDA experimented on cats for years — infecting them with a disease called toxoplasmosis, and feeding cat meat to some of them, before putting them down. Shocking stuff, to be sure. But they're stopping these experiments after a public backlash. Cats win again.

We're always looking for fact-check suggestions.

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