PolitiFact examines Kamala Harris and Donald Trump’s immigration claims
Updated: October 25, 2024 5:18pm EDT
Hampshire County Commission. Learn about the current state of the presidential election campaign. It’s all part of a partnership between WMUR and POLITIFACT. If you think about it, we’re only 11 days away from voting day at this point. PolitiFact’s Lou Jacobson is back. Lou, nice to see you as always. We would like to get into the topic of immigration. Immigration is really one of the biggest issues in this competition. I know former President Trump is talking about this in Texas today. Kamala Harris is talking about it again this week. In fact, in a recent town hall with CNN Vice President Harris, he made this claim that, as of today, he has cut immigration flows by more than half, according to the quote. What did PolitiFact find out about this claim? So, this one may come as a bit of a surprise. You can’t tell from a lot of the political rhetoric out there. But, but, her claim is actually correct. So depending on when you start counting, the drop is actually much more than half. We looked at the number of times Border Patrol crossed migrants between ports of entry on the Southwest border. Comparing the current numbers to September 2023, there is a 75% decrease compared to December 2023. Compared to January 2024, that number is down 78%, or about 57%. Experts say it’s difficult to pinpoint a single cause for this downturn, but policies under President Joe Biden are generally at least somewhat well-received, including some that are more likely to be pursued. That includes President Biden’s orders that made it difficult. Asylum at the border. So, with that, we have made this statement completely true. Now let’s move on to the claims former President Trump made in his campaign ads. Lou in the ad argues that Harris wants to give undocumented immigrants Medicare and Social Security while forcing struggling seniors to pay more in Social Security taxes. So what did PolitiFact discover about this claim? It’s false. When we looked into this, the Trump campaign told us that Trump was talking about her support for eliminating the payroll tax cap, the tax that directly funds Social Security. . Currently, under current law, wealthy taxpayers are exempt from payroll taxes because they don’t have to pay any taxes. After the first $168,000, they have earned money from their work. So, so, what Kamala Harris wants to do is remove that cap at $168,000. Then start taxing anything above that. But when ads say they want struggling seniors to pay more Social Security taxes, that’s actually not true. In two ways. First, the people who would pay more under Harris’ proposal are workers, not the elderly, and certainly not retirees. And secondly, they won’t have any trouble. If you earned $168,000 at your job, that’s nearly three times what the typical worker earns. As for the second part of the argument, she said nothing during the campaign about giving social security and health care to people without legal status here. All things considered, we gave this statement a rating of “False”. Okay. A busy 11 days begin now. Lou Jacobson, we expect a lot of things to be right
PolitiFact reviews Kamala Harris and Donald Trump’s immigration claims
Updated: October 25, 2024 5:18pm EDT
Video: PolitiFact’s Lou Jacobson evaluates presidential candidates’ immigration claims. That includes claims from Vice President Kamala Harris about how much the administration has reduced immigration flows, as well as claims from former President Donald Trump’s campaign ads about immigration and immigration. Social Security.News 9 partnered with PolitiFact to investigate claims made by candidates on both sides of the aisle. Check out more fact checks here.
Video: PolitiFact’s Lou Jacobson evaluates presidential candidates’ claims about immigration. That includes claims from Vice President Kamala Harris about how much the administration has reduced immigration flows, as well as claims from former President Donald Trump’s campaign ads about immigration and immigration. social security.
News 9 partnered with PolitiFact to investigate claims made by candidates on both sides of the aisle. Check out more fact checks here.
