Trump’s address to Congress revived false or misleading claims on immigration
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- Trump repeatedly addressed immigration during his address to a joint session of Congress.
- Springfield, Ohio, a hot topic during the presidential campaign, came up again during Trump’s speech.
WASHINGTON — During Donald Trump’s campaign for president, he and his allies repeated misleading or false claims on immigration, including that then-President Biden had secretly flown migrants into the U.S., that FEMA used disaster relief money on migrants, and that many immigrants are violent criminals.
On Tuesday, Trump repeated or alluded to those claims and more during a nearly two-hour address to Congress — his first as the 47th president — that often returned to one of his favorite topics.
“The media and our friends in the Democrat Party kept saying we needed new legislation, we must have legislation to secure the border. But it turned out that all we really needed was a new president,” Trump said to applause from Republican lawmakers.
President Trump laid out an aggressive approach to ‘renewing the American dream’ in his address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday.
In the audience were familiar faces — people Trump has referenced to make points about immigration. Among them were the mother and sister of Laken Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student who was killed last year in Athens, Ga., by a recently arrived Venezuelan immigrant.
Immigration officials said Jose Ibarra, the man convicted of murdering Riley, had entered the United States illegally and had been allowed to stay in the country while he pursued his immigration case. Riley’s family joined Trump on the campaign trail. A bill named after her, which mandates federal detention for immigrants charged with theft-related crimes, became the first signed by Trump in his second term.
Also in attendance was Alexis Nungaray, the mother of 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray, who was killed last year in Houston; two other recently arrived immigrants from Venezuela have been charged with murdering her. Alexis Nungaray joined Trump last year during a campaign event at the southern U.S. border.
Some of Trump’s claims Tuesday on immigration have previously been debunked.
Listing what he viewed as unnecessary federal programs uncovered by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, Trump referred to “$59 million for illegal alien hotel rooms in New York City.”
Musk said millions of dollars meant for disaster relief were spent illegally by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to house migrants in “high-end” hotels. The claim led to the firing of four federal employees and the suspension of payments to New York for migrant housing.
But it wasn’t FEMA money — the money is administered by FEMA on behalf of U.S. Customs and Border Protection for its Shelter and Services Program, which supports local governments and nonprofits that help arriving migrants. In fiscal year 2024, the average daily rate for rooms contracted through an agreement with the Hotel Assn. of New York City was $156, according to a report by the city’s comptroller’s office.
Similarly, Trump falsely accused Biden last year of running out of disaster funding after spending it all on migrants.
Criticizing the record arrivals at the southern border under Biden, Trump said “many of them were murderers, human traffickers, gang members and other criminals from the streets of dangerous cities all throughout the world.”
Researchers have found that undocumented immigrants commit crimes at substantially lower rates than native-born citizens.
“Joe Biden didn’t just open our borders,” Trump said Tuesday. “He flew illegal aliens over them to overwhelm our schools, hospitals and communities throughout the country.”
The claim that Biden secretly flew hundreds of thousands of migrants into the U.S., elevated by the right-leaning Center for Immigration Studies, referred to people vetted and authorized for travel under a program that allowed in people from certain countries who could fund their own plane tickets.
The former president says migrants are voting illegally, eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, and coming from jails and mental institutions.
Even Springfield, Ohio, made a flitting comeback in Trump’s speech on Tuesday.
During a debate last year with his Democratic opponent, then-Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump repeated a false viral rumor that Haitian immigrants in Sprinfield were “eating the pets of the people that live there.” Springfield became inundated with hoax bomb threats that forced lockdowns, evacuations and closures at hospitals, schools and government buildings.
“Entire towns like Aurora, Colo., and Springfield, Ohio, buckled under the weight of the migrant occupation and corruption like nobody’s ever seen before,” Trump said Tuesday. “Beautiful towns destroyed.”
Some misleading statements were new. For example, Trump said February had “by far the lowest ever recorded” numbers of illegal border crossings. News outlets reported that the Border Patrol recorded around 8,300 arrests of migrants who attempted to unlawfully cross the U.S.-Mexico border between ports of entry.
Border Patrol’s own data going back to fiscal year 1925 show multiple instances in which the average monthly arrests fell below 8,000 per month, most recently in 1967.
Angelica Salas, executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, said Trump’s statements on immigration were unsurprising.
“He is obsessed with 0.04% of the population (13 million undocumented) and wants to place in their lap all the ills of this nation,” Salas said in a statement after the speech.
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