adminNight two of the Republican National Convention has kicked off in Milwaukee.
CNN’s Facts First team is fact checking the convention and will update this page throughout the night.
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise said Tuesday that migrants are arriving in the US after having been deliberately freed from prison.
“On the border, Biden and Harris opened it up to the entire world. Prisons are being emptied,” said Scalise, a Louisiana Republican.
Facts first: There is no evidence for Scalise’s claim that “prisons of being emptied” so that prisoners can travel to the US as migrants.
“I do a daily news search to see what’s going on in prisons around the world and have seen absolutely no evidence that any country is emptying its prisons and sending them all to the US,” said Helen Fair, who is co-author of the World Prison Population List, which tracks the global prison population, and a research fellow at the Institute for Crime & Justice Policy Research at Birkbeck, University of London.
Trump, now the Republican presidential nominee, has repeatedly made such claims in his own speeches and interviews. But Trump has never provided any proof for the claim.
Trump’s campaign has provided CNN with only a vague 2022 article from right-wing website Breitbart about a supposed federal intelligence report warning Border Patrol agents about Venezuela freeing violent prisoners who had then joined migrant caravans.
But this supposed claim about Venezuela’s actions has never been corroborated, and experts have told CNN, PolitiFact and FactCheck.org that they know of no proof of any such thing having happened.
The recorded global prison population increased from October 2021 to April 2024, from about 10.77 million people to about 10.99 million people, according to the World Prison Population List.
From CNN’s Daniel Dale
Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York claimed in her Republican National Convention speech Tuesday that Biden’s presidency has led to the “highest rate of inflation” in her lifetime.
Facts First: This claim is out of date.
While the year-over-year inflation rate in June 2022, about 9.1%, was the highest since late 1981, inflation has declined sharply since that Biden-era peak, and the most recent available rate, for June 2024, was about 3%. That rate was exceeded as recently as 2011.
Stefanik was born in 1984.
From CNN’s Daniel Dale and Piper Hudspeth Blackburn
Wisconsin Senate candidate exaggerates the numbers of fentanyl deaths
Eric Hovde, the Republican running for Senate in Wisconsin, claimed in his RNC speech Tuesday that the Biden administration “emboldened drug cartels to flood our streets with fentanyl killing over 100,000 Americans every year” by opening the country’s southern border and allowing “criminals and terrorists to enter the country.”
Facts First: It’s a significant exaggeration that fentanyl kills more than 100,000 Americans every year due to the country’s “open” borders. The number of overdose deaths involving synthetic opioids in 2023, including fentanyl, was approximately 75,000, according to estimated and provisional data.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in May that roughly 107,500 people in the US died from a drug overdose, but that is the total number of people who died from an overdose from any kind of drug.
Synthetic opioids, including fentanyl, were involved in the majority of those fatalities, making up nearly 70% of overdose deaths in 2023, but they did not account for all of them.
In fact, compared with 2022, there were around 1,500 fewer overdose deaths involving fentanyl and other synthetic opioids in 2023. The estimated number of deaths involving cocaine and psychostimulants such as methamphetamines increased in 2023.
Specifically, in 2023, there were 74,702 deaths from synthetic opioids, and most of those deaths were from fentanyl. By comparison, in 2022 the estimated number was 76,226, according to the CDC.
It is also worth noting that fentanyl is largely smuggled by US citizens through legal ports of entry, rather than by migrants sneaking into the country. Contrary to frequent claims by Republicans, the border is not “open”; border officers have seized an increasing amount of illicit fentanyl, numbering in the hundreds of millions of pills, under Biden.
From CNN’s Jen Christensen
Kari Lake said Tuesday that Democratic Arizona Rep. Ruben Gallego, her likely opponent in the state’s US Senate race this fall, voted last week to let undocumented immigrants “illegally cast a ballot in this upcoming election.”
“These guys are full, they’re full of bad ideas,” Lake said in her speech. “Just last week Ruben Gallego voted to let the millions of people who poured into our country illegally cast a ballot in this upcoming election.”
Fact First: This claim is false.
The House did not vote on whether to allow noncitizens to vote. The chamber passed a bill on July 10 that would require documentary proof of US citizenship to register to vote in federal elections. Gallego voted against the legislation, which is not expected to be taken up by the Democratic-controlled Senate.
It is already illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections, and experts say it rarely occurs. When people register to vote, they must provide a driver’s license or Social Security number, and their identity is checked against existing databases. Voters are required to swear under penalty of perjury that they are a US citizen. Noncitizens who vote illegally can face imprisonment or deportation.
Gallego said in a statement that he opposed the bill because its “only purpose is to disenfranchise tens of thousands of Arizonans, and I will not vote to take away the rights of Arizonans to stop something that is already illegal.”
“Of course, only U.S. citizens should vote,” said Gallego. “But this bill isn’t about that, it’s about making it harder for Arizonans to vote, including married women, servicemembers, Native Arizonans, seniors, and people with disabilities.”
From CNN’s Piper Hudspeth Blackburn
Perry Johnson, a Michigan business owner who previously ran for governor and president, said Tuesday that income rose consistently under former President Donald Trump.
“Under Trump, family income went up every year. That is a fact,” Johnson told the crowd.
Facts first: Johnson is incorrect. Median family income fell in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic in both inflation-adjusted and non-adjusted terms.
Typical family income grew by several thousand dollars during each of Trump’s first three years in office, before adjusting for inflation. But it fell by $1,660 in 2020, when the pandemic wreaked havoc on the US economy.
After factoring in inflation, typical family income fell by nearly $2,900 in 2020, after rising in each of the first three years of Trump’s administration.
From CNN’s Tami Luhby
A video played near the beginning of Republican National Committee proceedings on Tuesday evening featured a narrator saying, “It’s not just big cities. Rising crime is a problem everywhere.”
Facts First: The claim that there is a problem “everywhere” with “rising crime” is false. Both violent crime and property crime dropped significantly in the US in 2023 and in the first quarter of 2024, though there were increases in some communities.
Preliminary FBI data for 2023 showed a roughly 13% national decline in murder and a roughly 6% national decline in overall violent crime compared to 2022, bringing both murder and violent crime levels below where they were in 2020, Trump’s last calendar year in office. And preliminary FBI data for the first quarter of 2024 showed an even steeper drop from the same quarter in 2023 – a roughly 26% decline in murder and roughly 15% decline in overall violent crime.
There are limitations to the FBI-published data, which comes from local law enforcement – the numbers are preliminary, not all communities submitted data, and the submitted data usually has some initial errors – so these statistics may not precisely capture the size of the recent declines in crime. But these statistics and other data sources make it clear crime has indeed declined to some extent nationally, though not everywhere.
Crime data expert Jeff Asher, co-founder of the firm AH Datalytics, said that if the final 2023 figures show a decline in murder of at least 10% from 2022, this would be the fastest US decline “ever recorded.” And he noted that both the preliminary FBI-published data from the first quarter of 2024 and also “crime data collected from several independent sources point to an even larger decline in property and violent crime, including a substantially larger drop in murder, so far this year compared to 2023, though there is still time left in the year for those trends to change.”
From CNN’s Daniel Dale
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