Fact check: Trump makes false and unsubstantiated claims in border speech

Washington CNN —

President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump delivered back-to-back Thursday speeches at different Texas locations near the border with Mexico.

Biden’s speech, largely delivered from a prepared text, was highly factual. Biden devoted much of the address to an accurate description of various provisions of the bipartisan border bill he supports but Trump’s opposition helped to kill in Congress.

Trump’s speech minutes prior, much of which appeared to be off the cuff, was filled with assertions about migrants that were unsubstantiated, misleading or plain false.

Some of his words were too conspiratorially vague to definitively fact-check. For example, Trump spoke of migrants as “entire columns of fighting-age men” and said “they look like warriors to me; something’s going on, and it’s bad” – winking at a baseless narrative about foreign adversaries using migration to surreptitiously assemble some sort of enemy force in the US. He said he thinks unnamed people are allowing migrants into the country because “they’re looking for votes,” faintly echoing his previous false claim about migrants being signed up to vote in the 2024 election – and declining to explain that non-citizens cannot vote in federal, state and almost all local elections (though some migrants might potentially receive citizenship years down the road).

Trump also spoke of the US being “overrun” by a “new form” of crime he called “Biden migrant crime.” He made that claim though early data suggests that in 2023 the US was at or around its lowest violent crime rate in more than 50 years amid a sharp decline in homicides; though there were cases of undocumented people committing crimes during his own presidency; and though,