US President Joe Biden and Republican rival Donald Trump on Thursday took digs at each other in the first debate of the 2024 election campaign.
AFP fact-checked what the candidates said on key issues.
‘Migrant crime’
Trump falsely claimed that under Biden “we no longer have a border.”
“Because of his ridiculous, insane and deeply stupid policies, people are coming in and killing our citizens at a level we’ve never seen before. We call it ‘migrant crime.’ I call it the ‘Biden migrant crime.'”
Following record border crossings and criticism of a bipartisan immigration bill that failed in Congress, Biden signed an executive order earlier this month that would temporarily close the border to asylum seekers once certain daily limits are exceeded.
According to Nicole Hallett, director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School, this has “led to increased enforcement at the border.”
Hallett told AFP that despite some high-profile incidents, including the murder of a university student in the state of Georgia, there is “no evidence” of the migrant crime wave described by Trump.
“Crime has decreased across the country, although migration has increased,” he said.
Violent and property crimes are at their lowest levels in decades, according to FBI data from 2022, the most recent year for which statistics are available.
“The vast majority of violent crimes are committed by civilians,” said Jeffrey Fagan, a professor at Columbia Law School.
A June 2023 study found that imprisonment rates among immigrants from all regions had declined since 1960.
Other research has also found that immigrants commit fewer violent crimes than U.S. citizens — including a Cato Institute report published this week that found that immigrants in the state of Texas are less likely to be convicted of murder.
Michelle Mittelstaedt, communications director at the Migration Policy Institute, said there was no evidence to support Trump’s claim during the debate that prisoners and people from mental institutions were coming across the southern U.S. border.
The blame for inflation
Both Trump and Biden have attempted to deflect blame for rising prices by criticizing each other’s economic policies.
“He causes inflation. I gave him a country that had no inflation at all,” Trump said, repeating his favorite — but false — line about bringing about the greatest economy in U.S. history.
Biden responded by saying that Trump had “destroyed the economy” and that there were “no jobs” when he took office.
Both candidates misled by ignoring COVID-19’s impact on the economy.
When Trump left office, inflation was about 1.4 percent while the country grappled with the virus.
Unemployment was about 6.4 percent, down from its peak of 14.8 percent in April 2020, after the outbreak, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Inflation began to rise as the country opened up in April 2021. It has continued to rise under Biden’s presidency, peaking at nearly nine percent in June 2022, before falling to its current level of around three percent.
A number of factors unrelated to the pandemic have contributed to this trend, including emergency spending packages under both Trump and Biden, supply shortages, and the war in Ukraine.
Rewrite on January 6
Trump attempted to deflect blame for the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, for which he was impeached, by pointing to former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
He falsely claimed that “I offered them 10,000 troops or the National Guard, but they turned it down.”
Pelosi’s team has denied being aware of any request for National Guard assistance until after the Capitol was besieged by Trump supporters seeking to overturn the 2020 election.
In fact, Pelosi wouldn’t even have had the authority to deny the activation of the National Guard if Trump had allowed it.
The District of Columbia National Guard’s website states that it “reports only to the President.”
Trump’s claim is based on comments by former acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller, who told a reporter that he remembered Trump floating the idea of needing 10,000 troops before January 6.
But Miller later told lawmakers there was “no order from the president.”
The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack wrote in its final report that Trump “never gave any order to deploy the National Guard.”
Trump again insisted there was “fraud and everything else ridiculous” about the 2020 election, in which he lost to Biden — claims that officials in both parties have denied.
Dozens of lawsuits aimed at overturning the election failed, while audits and recounts in battleground states confirmed Biden’s victory.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
