In a series of public appearances on June 7, Mike Pence formally jumped into the 2024 presidential race, becoming the first vice president in 83 years to challenge a president under whom he served.

Pence had plenty to say about his former boss, Donald Trump, and even more to say about the current president, Joe Biden. He got a few things wrong regarding both men.

• Pence gave the misleading impression that the Obama administration gave Ukraine no “military resources at all” after Russia’s 2014 invasion. The U.S. provided nonlethal military aid, including training, vehicles and radar equipment.
• He falsely claimed that the Trump administration “continued” a policy of separating families that illegally crossed the border that “began under the Obama administration.” Experts have said that Trump’s new policy was very different from Barack Obama’s.
• Pence claimed a surge in illegal immigration is “all being driven by the cartels and the failed policies of the Biden administration.” But immigration experts say there are more complex push and pull factors that explain the surge.
• The former vice president misleadingly accused the Biden administration of “giving Russia back a Nord Stream 2 deal,” referring to a Russian natural gas pipeline to Germany that remains inoperable and under U.S. sanctions.
• Pence said it took just one day for the FBI to come to his house after being told he had classified material in his home, but it took “80 days” for the Department of Justice to come to Biden’s office after classified documents were found there. But that’s not how things unfolded.
• Pence said “inflation is at a 40-year high” — a statement that was true last summer but no longer. He said “it all started” with a Democratic COVID-19 relief law, but economists point to the pandemic as the main culprit.

Pence kicked off his campaign with a speech in Ankeny, Iowa, which he followed with a CNN town hall.

Obama’s Ukraine Aid

Pence dismissed nonlethal military aid the U.S. gave Ukraine to fight back against Russia in 2014, claiming that the Obama administration provided no “military resources.”

“Our administration ended what was a ban during the Obama-Biden administration on any military resources at all,” Pence said during the town hall. “We provided javelin missiles — all they were providing was military meals and blankets. We corrected that and Ukraine was better situated to be able to deal with this Russian invasion.”

The Obama administration didn’t provide Ukraine with lethal military weaponry, as Ukraine’s then-President Petro Poroshenko had requested. However, as we’ve written before, including this week when Chris Christie made a similar claim, the U.S. did supply other military and security aid that was worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

In a January 2017 report, the Congressional Research Service said the U.S. had given over $1.3 billion in foreign assistance to Ukraine amid hostilities with Russia in 2014. Over $600 million of that was security aid.

When testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in March 2016, Victoria Nuland, who was the assistant secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, detailed some of the security aid to Ukraine, which she said included military training, communications equipment, vehicles, night-vision goggles and counter-mortar radar to detect incoming artillery fire.

Family Separation Policies

Border security policies that separated parents and children who migrated illegally were not the same under Presidents Obama and Trump, contrary to Pence’s claim on CNN.

“Look, the family separation policy actually began under the Obama administration,” Pence said. “And then we continued it until President Trump rightly reversed course.”

That’s not accurate. As we’ve written, Trump signed an executive order that reversed his own “zero tolerance” border policy — not Obama’s.

Initially, the Trump administration’s 2018 policy, which was implemented to deter illegal immigration along the southern border, required the Department of Homeland Security to refer all adults who illegally entered the U.S. for criminal prosecution. If they were traveling with their children, the minors were separated from their parents, who entered the federal court system and were detained in holding centers for adults only.

Immigration experts told us prior administrations didn’t have the same blanket policy to prosecute parents and split them from their kids.

“[George W.] Bush and Obama did not have policies that resulted in the mass separation of parents and children like we’re seeing under the current administration,” Sarah Pierce, a Migration Policy Institute analyst, told us in June 2018. She said child separations under administrations before Trump’s were done in “really limited circumstances” such as suspicion of trafficking or other fraud.

The Bipartisan Policy Center’s Theresa Cardinal Brown and Tim O’Shea wrote an explainer that made a similar point about the different policies. The authors also said pre-Trump administrations often used family detention facilities that allowed relatives to stay together until their deportation cases were resolved. Other times, families were released from custody but were tracked with devices while awaiting their court date.

Blaming Biden for Surge in Illegal Immigration

There has been an unmistakable surge in immigrants attempting to cross the border illegally, a trend Pence blamed squarely on the cartels and what he called “the failed policies of the Biden administration.” But immigration experts say there are more complex push and pull factors that explain the surge.

“Five million people coming across our border in the last two years, all being driven by the cartels and the failed policies of the Biden administration,” Pence said during the CNN town hall.

It’s true there have been nearly 5 million apprehensions of people trying to cross the southern border illegally since Biden took office in January, 2021, according to data compiled by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. But as we have explained before, that number is a bit inflated by repeat offenders.

Many of the apprehensions at the border have been illegal border crossings that resulted in immediate expulsions under Title 42, a public health law the Trump administration began invoking at the southwest border in March 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Instead of being detained for a longer period of time, being criminally prosecuted or having a formal removal order placed on their record, those subject to Title 42 were simply turned around at the border. As a result, experts at the Migration Policy Institute said, it encouraged people to try crossing again and again, driving up the apprehension numbers. CBP data back that up. The recidivism rate — meaning the share of people caught crossing more than once — was 27% in fiscal year 2021, which began under Trump on Oct. 1, 2020, and ended on Sept. 30, 2021, when Biden was president. By comparison, the rate was just 7% in fiscal year 2019. With the pandemic officially over, the Biden administration lifted Title 42 in early May.

Nonetheless, the number of apprehensions of people trying to enter the U.S. illegally at the southwest border has been historically high during Biden’s presidency. As we noted in our latest installment of “Biden’s Numbers,” apprehensions rose 342% when comparing the 12 months ending in March to Trump’s last year in office.

Michelle Mittelstadt, director of communications for the Migration Policy Institute, said at least some of the surge in immigration has been because the Biden administration has been perceived as being more lenient toward migrants at the border than the Trump administration was, which encouraged more people to attempt to come to the U.S.

But to place the blame overwhelmingly on Biden’s policies, as Pence did, ignores some of the push and pull factors that have driven a surge in migration not just to the U.S., but around the whole region.

“A balanced view of the drivers of migration to the U.S.-Mexico border would look at both the pull factors — which include a strong U.S. economy, a labor market that has more than 10 million job openings, legal pathways that are insufficient to address labor and family reunification needs, and changing U.S. policies – as well as the push factors,” Mittelstadt told us via email.

“And there are many push factors, including political and economic instability in countries such as Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua; a country on the brink of failure (Haiti); record humanitarian protection needs around the globe; and climate-induced natural disasters and crop failure,” Mittelstadt said. “While much of this has resulted in record levels of migration within Latin America and the Caribbean, some migration has also headed towards the United States. Finally, there is the pandemic, which chilled mobility of all sorts globally in 2020 and into 2021. No region of the world was more affected economically by the pandemic than Latin America and the Caribbean. So some of the movements being seen to the border today are the result of an artificial, temporary chilling of movement, as well as the economic repercussions of the pandemic, with the strong U.S. economic recovery making the income gap with other countries in the region even wider.”

Russia’s Inoperable Natural Gas Pipeline to Germany

Pence misleadingly accused the Biden administration of “giving Russia back a Nord Stream 2 deal,” referring to a natural gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea from Russia to Germany. The pipeline is completed, but not operational because it needs Germany’s approval — which the country withheld because of Russian aggression in Ukraine.

We have been over this issue more than once, because Trump has falsely claimed that Biden “approved” Nord Stream 2 and “opened it up.”

A quick rundown of the facts: Nord Stream 2 runs parallel to Nord Stream 1, which has been operational since 2011. Both are owned by Gazprom, a state-owned gas company, as explained in a March 2022 report by the Congressional Research Service. The U.S. has been concerned about Europe’s increasing reliance on Russian energy and tried to stop the pipeline “through progressively more stringent sanctions legislation enacted in 2017, 2019, and 2020” that slowed down construction.

After the 2019 sanctions, which targeted companies involved in the construction of the pipeline, work was suspended for about a year, resuming in December 2020, while Trump and Pence were still in office. At the time, the pipeline was reportedly about 90% complete.

After taking office, the Biden administration indicated that its “ability to prevent the pipeline from becoming operational was limited, even with additional sanctions,” CRS said in its report. The Biden administration also “expressed concern that additional U.S. sanctions could have jeopardized U.S.-German and U.S.-European cooperation,” because Germany saw “the pipeline as an important natural gas corridor,” the report said.

In May 2021, Biden waived sanctions against those involved in the Nord Stream 2 project, which was completed in September 2021. Pence is presumably referring to the sanctions being waived, when he said Biden gave “Russia back a Nord Stream 2 deal.” But, as we said, the pipeline is still not operational and final approval is up to Germany.

In response to Russian aggression in Ukraine, Germany on Feb. 22, 2022, suspended the certification process that Russia needs to operate the pipeline, and the U.S. a day later resumed sanctions against Nord Stream 2 AG, a subsidiary of Gazprom, and its executives. Since the war started, Nord Stream 2 AG has received two court extensions in an effort to stave off bankruptcy. The latest “stay of bankruptcy” lasts until next month.

Classified Documents

During the CNN town hall, Pence said he was “very troubled last summer when, for the first time in history, there was a search warrant executed at the home of a former president of the United States.” Pence argued there are “dozens of ways that could have been handled” differently.

Pence then said justice has been applied unevenly by the FBI in some of its classified documents cases.

“I mean, when I informed the Department of Justice that we had classified materials potentially in our home, they were at my home. The FBI was on my front doorstep the next day,” Pence said. “And what we found out was that, when Joe Biden apparently alerted the Department of Justice, 80 days later, they showed up at his office. That’s not equal treatment under the law.”

That’s not an accurate account of how things unfolded regarding classified documents held by Biden.

But let’s start with Pence’s mishandling of classified documents. After the classified documents investigations emerged for both Biden and Trump, Pence said he “took it upon myself to review our files” at his home in Indiana.

According to NBC News, a team of lawyers for Pence discovered a “small number of documents that could potentially contain sensitive or classified information” in Pence’s residence on Jan. 16, and they immediately notified the National Archives. The National Archives alerted the Department of Justice, and three days later, on Jan. 19 — with Pence’s blessing — FBI agents came to Pence’s Indiana home and retrieved the documents, NBC reported.

Three weeks later, on Feb. 10, the FBI — with the cooperation of Pence — conducted a five-hour search of Pence’s home and discovered another classified document, NBC News reported.

Last week, Pence was informed that he would not be charged for his mishandling of classified documents, according to a letter obtained by NBC News.

“They concluded that it was an innocent mistake,” Pence said at the CNN town hall.

That’s not dissimilar from the way things were handled in the case involving Biden. The Justice Department quickly retrieved classified documents found by Biden’s attorneys, and later, the FBI conducted its own searches of Biden’s offices and residences.

We laid out the details in our Jan. 19 story, “Timeline of Biden’s Classified Documents.”

Although details were not publicly revealed until early January, attorneys for Biden first discovered what the White House Counsel’s Office called “a small number of documents with classified markings” at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington, D.C. on Nov. 2. The White House Counsel’s Office notified the National Archives, which took possession of the documents the following morning.

On Nov. 4, the National Archives Office contacted a prosecutor at the Department of Justice and informs him that documents which bear classified markings are now secured in a National Archives facility.

According to Attorney General Merrick Garland, the FBI on Nov. 9 began “an assessment, consistent with standard protocols, to understand whether classified information had been mishandled in violation of federal law.” In “mid-November,” the FBI also searched the Penn Biden Center offices, according to CBS News’ reporting. The FBI did not seek or need a search warrant, because Biden’s representatives cooperated with the search. So in that case, there were two weeks between the discovery of documents and the FBI search of the offices — not 80 days. And, we would note, that was a shorter time than the gap between first-discovery and the FBI search of Pence’s home.

But that was not the end of Biden’s classified documents problems.

On Dec. 20, Biden’s personal counsel informed the DOJ that additional documents from Biden’s time as vice president bearing classification markings were found in the garage of Biden’s home in Wilmington, Delaware. The FBI took possession of the documents, Garland revealed at a Jan. 12 press conference.

Then, on Jan. 11, Biden’s personal attorneys searched his Delaware homes in Wilmington and Rehoboth Beach, and in the Wilmington home, they came across a document with classified markings and immediately contacted the Department of Justice. The next day, DOJ came and took those documents from the home.

On Jan. 20, investigators with the Department of Justice – with the cooperation of the Biden team – conducted a “thorough search” of Biden’s Wilmington home and took “possession of materials it [the department] deemed within the scope of its inquiry, including six items consisting of documents with classification markings and surrounding materials,” according to a statement released by a personal attorney for Biden. On Feb. 1, the FBI searched Biden’s house in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. According to an attorney for Biden, “No documents with classified markings were found” in the three-and-a-half-hour search. The Justice Department “took for further review some materials and handwritten notes that appear to relate to his [Biden’s] time as Vice President.”

Contrary to Pence’s statement, there was no 80-day delay between the dates when Biden’s attorneys notified authorities they had discovered classified documents at a location and when the FBI showed up to either pick those documents up, or to conduct an independent search.

As we have written, there are significant differences between Biden’s situation and Trump’s, as we detailed in our story “Classified Documents Found at Former Biden Office, Drawing Comparisons to Trump.” In Trump’s case, the search warrant was issued after months of negotiations and a grand jury subpoena resulted in only a partial return of classified documents.

There is also a matter of scale. According to CBS News’ reporting and what we know from statements by Biden’s lawyers, less than 30 classified documents were found in Biden’s possession at different locations. By contrast, the Department of Justice says that in its search at Mar-a-Lago, officials took possession of 18 government documents marked as top secret, 53 marked as secret and 30 marked as confidential. That’s a total of 101 classified documents.

Inflation

In the town hall, Pence wrongly said that “inflation is at a 40-year high” and “it all started when President Joe Biden and the Democrats passed a $2 trillion bill in the name of COVID.” Inflation was at a 40-year high, but not now. And the legislation he referenced didn’t start it all — economists point to several reasons for high inflation, beginning with the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic.

There’s no doubt inflation has been high in the last few years. The Consumer Price Index rose 9.1% for the 12 months ending in June 2022, the largest increase since November 1981, 41 years prior, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But the figures have dropped since then. Inflation was up 4.9% for the 12 months ending in April. Before Biden took office, inflation last had been that high in September 2008.

Republicans have repeatedly pinned all of the blame for inflation on the American Rescue Plan, a $1.9 trillion pandemic relief law passed by Democrats in March 2021 that included $1,400 checks to most Americans, expanded unemployment benefits, and money for schools, small businesses and states. As we’ve written before, many economists say the law played a role in boosting inflation, but it was hardly the only factor — with the economic repercussions of the coronavirus pandemic looming large.  

The pandemic acutely affected supply, demand and labor, as people spent considerably less for months and then began spending considerably more. Also, gas prices were affected by supply/demand pandemic fallout, followed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the sanctions many countries, including the U.S., put on Russian oil.

Economists we interviewed last summer told us that while the ARP contributed some to inflation, the country also needed some level of stimulus to help the economy recover from the pandemic.

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Former President Donald Trump’s town hall event felt like a lightning round of false and misleading claims — most of which we’ve heard before. Among them:

• He claimed the conservative group True the Vote found Democrats “stuffing ballot boxes” with “millions of votes” and it was caught “on government cameras.” It did not.

• Trump falsely claimed that he “didn’t ask” Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger “to find” him more votes. In a Jan. 2, 2021, call, Trump told Raffensperger: “I just want to find 11,780 votes,” which was one more than Trump needed to win the state.

• Then-Vice President Mike Pence didn’t have the legal right to send electoral votes back to the states, contrary to Trump’s claim that Pence “did something wrong” by not rejecting the votes in states he lost.

• Trump falsely claimed that “we have open borders,” when each month border officials have apprehended and expelled tens of thousands of people who illegally enter the country.

• He made an unsubstantiated claim that many of the immigrants coming illegally across the southern border are people released from prisons and mental institutions.

• The former president wrongly claimed that the Presidential Records Act allowed him to negotiate the return of presidential materials to the National Archives and Records Administration.

• President Joe Biden donated 1,850 boxes of records from his Senate years to the University of Delaware. There’s no evidence they contain classified information or that Biden refused to give them “back,” as Trump said.

• Trump claimed that “we were energy independent” during his administration, but the U.S. never attained 100% self-sufficiency and still relied on energy imports under Trump.

• He wrongly claimed that U.S. gasoline prices reached $9 under Biden. The highest weekly average price under Biden was about $5 in June 2022.

• Trump claimed that under Roe v. Wade, “They could kill the baby … after the baby was born.” The court opinion allowed states to prohibit abortion after fetal viability, with exceptions for the mother’s life and health.

Trump — the leading candidate for the 2024 Republican nomination, despite a criminal indictment in New York and an ongoing criminal investigation in Georgia — took questions from New Hampshire Republicans and undeclared voters in the May 10 prime time event moderated by CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins.

False Claims of Vote Fraud

Still refusing to accept the results of an election he lost, Trump made numerous false claims about how the 2020 presidential election was “rigged.” For example, Trump claimed, “If you look at True the Vote, they found millions of votes on camera, on government cameras, where [Democrats] were stuffing ballot boxes.”

Trump is referring to the “2000 Mules” documentary by conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza, which purported to provide evidence that thousands of so-called “mules” were employed to illegally stuff ballot drop boxes with fraudulent ballots. The film was based on research from the conservative group True the Vote, which used geotracking data of cellphones and noted people who were near numerous ballot drop boxes and liberal nonprofits. We reviewed the film’s claims and found the evidence lacking.

When Georgia investigators looked into a handful of videos showing people depositing multiple ballots, it turned out to be people legally dropping off ballots for eligible voters in their immediate family. The House Jan. 6 committee released video of an interview of former Attorney General Bill Barr, who offered a blistering assessment, calling the cellphone data “singularly unimpressive” and saying the film simply “didn’t establish widespread illegal harvesting.”

Call to Georgia Secretary of State

Toward the end of the town hall, Collins revisited the topic of Trump’s baseless voter fraud claims.

Collins asked Trump about his Jan. 2, 2021, phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger — which has become the focus of a criminal investigation by the Fulton County district attorney’s office into whether Trump tried to illegally overturn the state’s 2020 presidential election outcome.

Asked if he would still make that call today, knowing that it would lead to a criminal investigation, Trump said there was nothing wrong with the call and that he was merely “questioning the election.”

Collins: You asked him to find you votes.

Trump: I didn’t ask him to find anything.

That’s false. Trump asked Raffensperger to find him enough votes so that he could win the state — after Joe Biden had already been certified and recertified as the winner in Georgia.

“I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have because we won the state,” Trump told Raffensperger on the call.

Specifically, Trump told Raffensperger to look in Cobb and Fulton counties — which were both won by Biden. “You will find you will be at 11,779 within minutes because Fulton County is totally corrupt,” Trump said on the call.

Pence Didn’t Have Right to Reject Electoral Votes

Trump was asked if he owed his vice president, Mike Pence, an apology over what happened during the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and Trump’s repeated attempts to push Pence to refuse to count electoral votes.

“No, because he did something wrong,” Trump said. “He should have sent the votes back to the state legislatures and I think we would have had a different outcome.”

A constitutional expert told us Pence did not have the legal right to change or reject the electoral votes. The Electoral Count Act, which was signed into law in 1887, says the vice president is simply supposed to hand the tellers the state certifications after he opens them, and the tellers are then to read those documents and make a list of the votes.

According to the Jan. 6 committee report, Pence and his counsel Greg Jacob and others told Trump that Pence did not have the authority to send those electoral votes back to the states. Even Trump’s lawyer John Eastman “admitted” that Trump had been advised that the vice president did not have the unilateral power to refuse to count votes under the Electoral College Act, but Trump “continued to pressure the Vice President to act illegally,” the report said.

Trump said Pence and others were wrong, and that the proof is that “right after the election they all met – the RINOs [Republicans in name only] and the Democrats – and they worked out a plan to make sure that future vice presidents don’t do what I said you could do.” Congress revised the Electoral Count Act in December 2022, but only to “reaffirm” that a vice president’s role in the electoral vote counting process is “ministerial.” It was not an admission that the law previously allowed a vice president to take the steps Trump sought.

Illegal Immigration

The U.S. does not “have open borders,” as Trump falsely claimed. U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials, particularly Border Patrol agents, have continued to apprehend and expel tens of thousands of people who illegally cross the southern border each month, according to the most recent CBP data.

In the Southwest Border Enforcement Report for fiscal year 2021, which was published in August 2022, the Office of Immigration Statistics said preliminary estimates indicated that the model-based apprehension rate in FY 2021 was about the same as the 78% average from FY 2018 to FY 2020, which were the three fiscal years when Trump was president the whole time. In its August 2020 Border Security Metrics Report, the Department of Homeland Security explained that the model-based apprehension rate is “the estimated share of all attempted unlawful border crossers between land [ports of entries] that is apprehended.”

No Evidence for Prisons Claim

As he has numerous times in recent months, Trump made the unsubstantiated claim that many of the immigrants coming illegally across the southern border are people released from prisons and mental institutions.

“Look what is happening at our southern border,” Trump said. “Millions and millions of people are coming in. They’re being released from prisons. They’re being released from mental institutions.”

We wrote about this claim in March when Trump said at a rally in Texas, “Other countries are emptying out their prisons, insane asylums and mental institutions and sending their most heinous criminals to the United States.” When making the claim, Trump has sometimes cited a news story he says he read, about a doctor at a mental institution in South America who said he no longer has people to take care of because all the patients are being sent to the U.S. We could not find any such story, and immigration experts we talked to said there’s simply no evidence that is happening.

“I cannot prove this is false, but I follow migration in Latin America and the Caribbean quite closely and have never ever heard anything like this related to current migration from the region,” Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute, told us. “I have never heard any credible claims that any country has been emptying its prisons or mental hospitals so that those released can migrate to the United States.”

Presidential Records Act

The former president wrongly claimed that the Presidential Records Act allowed him to negotiate with the National Archives and Records Administration for the return of presidential materials he took with him after leaving office. A president can keep personal materials, but not presidential documents.

The Presidential Records Act says that after a president’s term, the archivist “shall assume responsibility for the custody, control, and preservation of, and access to, the Presidential records of that President.”

Trump claimed, “We were negotiating with them as per, as per the Presidential Records Act,” adding that “all of the sudden, they raided the house.”

“They didn’t raid the house of Joe Biden,” Trump also said. CNN’s Collins correctly noted: “Joe Biden didn’t ignore a subpoena to get those documents back like you did.”

As we’ve written, Trump took eight months to comply with NARA’s requests for the return of presidential documents he had at his Mar-a-Lago home. NARA then discovered classified documents among those records. In responding to a subpoena for more classified material, Trump’s lawyers handed over an envelope with 38 classified documents.

Two months after that, the FBI obtained a court-approved search warrant for Mar-a-Lago and retrieved 13 boxes that contained “over one hundred unique documents with classification markings,” according to a court filing.

Biden Documents at University of Delaware

While talking about the Department of Justice’s investigation into his handling of classified documents, Trump repeated a claim that Biden mishandled and hid 1,850 boxes of classified records. “I have every right to [take classified documents] under the Presidential Records,” Trump said. (He doesn’t. See the section above on that act.) “Biden, on the other hand, he has 1,850 boxes.” Later on, Trump claimed that Biden “won’t give back the 1,850 boxes” and that “nobody even knows where they are.”

But there is no evidence any of the boxes from Biden contain classified information, and their location is known.

As we’ve written, Biden in 2012 donated more than 1,850 boxes of records from his years in the U.S. Senate to the University of Delaware. The documents are not available for public access following an agreement between Biden and the university at the time of the donation not to provide public access to any of the materials until “two years after the donor [Biden] retires from public life.” In October, a Delaware Superior Court judge upheld the University of Delaware’s refusal to provide access to the documents after the nonprofit Judicial Watch sought them through a Freedom of Information Act request.

The Justice Department, with Biden’s consent, reviewed the documents and did not find any with classified markings, although some were taken for further review, CBS News has reported.

‘Energy Independent’

“We were energy independent” during his administration, Trump said.

The U.S. never stopped relying on foreign sources of energy under Trump, as his claim suggested. During his presidency, for the first time in decades, the U.S. exported more energy than it imported; produced more energy than it consumed; and again became a net exporter of petroleum, which includes crude oil and refined products from crude oil, such as gasoline and other fuels. Even if “energy independence” was determined by being a net exporter or having more production than consumption, the country’s status has not changed under Biden.

See “Examining U.S. ‘Energy Independence’ Claims” and “FactChecking Trump’s Presidential Bid Announcement“ for more.

Gasoline Prices

Trump falsely claimed that “energy” — a reference to gasoline prices — “went from $1.87 to $5, $6, $7, $8 and even $9.”

The average price of regular gasoline was $2.38 per gallon the week Trump left office in January 2021, up from a low of $1.77 the final week of April 2020, according to Energy Information Administration figures. Under Biden, the average weekly price reached a record of $5.01 in June 2022. Most recently, the price was down to $3.53 the week of May 8.

There was at least one California county where gas prices climbed to almost $10 a gallon in June 2022, but the highest average price for all of California — which usually has the country’s most expensive gas — was about $6.44 that month, according to AAA.

As we have written before, experts have said that U.S. presidents have little influence over gas prices, which are mainly affected by the global price of crude oil, a fossil fuel that is refined into gasoline.

Abortion

Trump claimed that before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, “They could kill the baby in the ninth month or after the baby was born. Now they won’t be able to do that.” As we wrote in 2019 when he made a similar claim, killing a baby is a homicide.

The 1973 Roe opinion said the government can’t interfere with a right to an abortion in the first trimester of pregnancy. Once a fetus is viable outside the womb, the government could restrict or prohibit abortions — but there must be exceptions for the mother’s life and health, which meant both physical and mental health, the court clarified in a companion case.

Trump also said that abortion rights supporters were in favor of abortions very late in a pregnancy or “after the baby is born.” As we wrote recently, in 2021 and 2022, Democrats introduced a bill that, similar to Roe, would set a viability threshold for state restrictions, permitting abortions to be prohibited after viability but with exceptions for risks to the life or health of the mother. The two political parties disagree on what the “health” exception means, with Republicans viewing it as a loophole.

The Supreme Court overturned Roe on June 24, 2022, leaving the issue of regulating abortion to the states.

In 2020, the vast majority of abortions — 93.1% — in the U.S. occurred in the first trimester, at or before 13 weeks of gestation, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Less than 1% were performed at or after 21 weeks. A full-term pregnancy is typically 38 to 42 weeks.

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Summary

Here’s how things have changed in the U.S. so far under President Joe Biden, who announced on April 25 that he is officially running for reelection:

• The economy added 12.6 million jobs under Biden, putting the total 3.2 million higher than before the pandemic.

• The unemployment rate dropped back to 3.5%; unfilled job openings surged, with nearly 1.7 for every unemployed job seeker.

• Inflation roared back to the highest level in over 40 years, then slowed markedly. In all, consumer prices are up nearly 15%. Gasoline is up 54%.

• Weekly earnings rose briskly, by 11.3%. But after adjusting for inflation, “real” weekly earnings went down 3.6%.

• People apprehended for entering the U.S. illegally from Mexico has increased by 342%.

• Domestic crude oil production has increased 5.7%, and crude oil imports are up almost 6.7%.

• The economy grew at 2.1% last year, despite high inflation and concerns about a possible recession.

• The population without health insurance dropped by 1.6 percentage points.

• The number of people receiving federal food assistance has increased by about 1.2%.

• Despite a decline in 2022, the number of murders in 70 large U.S. cities has now gone up by 1.6%.

• The stock markets have underperformed. The S&P 500-stock index is up nearly 7% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average is up almost 8%, while the NASDAQ composite index is down 10.2%.

Analysis

This is our sixth installment of “Biden’s Numbers,” which we started in January 2022 and have updated since then every three months.

As we have done for former Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump, we’ve included the latest statistics from the most authoritative sources to provide a sense of how the country is performing. These statistics may or may not reflect the president’s policies. We make no attempt to render any judgments on how much blame or credit a president deserves. Opinions will vary on that.

Our next Biden’s Numbers article will appear in July.

Jobs and Unemployment

The number of people with jobs has increased dramatically since Biden took office, far surpassing pre-pandemic levels.

Employment — The U.S. economy added 12,600,000 jobs between Biden’s inauguration and March, the latest month for which data are available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The March figure is 3,198,000 higher than the February 2020 peak of employment before COVID-19 forced massive shutdowns and layoffs.

One major category of jobs is still lagging, however. Government employment is still 314,000 jobs short of the pre-pandemic peak. That includes 130,000 fewer public school teachers and other local education workers. 

Unemployment — The unemployment rate fell from 6.3% at the time Biden took office to 3.5% in March — a decline of 2.8 percentage points. The current rate is exactly where it was in the months just before the pandemic.

That’s uncommonly low. Since 1948, when BLS began keeping records, the jobless rate has been at or below 3.5% for only 61 months — including five months during Biden’s time and three months during the Trump years, just before the pandemic. Previously, the rate hadn’t been so low since the 1960s.

Job Openings — The number of unfilled job openings soared, reaching a record of over 12 million in March of last year, but then declined after the Federal Reserve began a steep series of interest rate increases aimed at cooling the economy to bring down price inflation.

The number of unfilled jobs has slipped down to just 9.9 million as of the last business day of February, the most recent month on record. That’s still an increase of over 2.8 million openings — or 38.4% — during Biden’s time.

In February, there was an average of nearly 1.7 jobs for every unemployed job seeker. When Biden took office, there were fewer jobs than unemployed job seekers.

The number of job openings in March is set to be released May 2.

Labor Force Participation — One reason many job openings go unfilled is that millions of Americans left the workforce during the pandemic and haven’t returned. The labor force participation rate (the percentage of the total population over age 16 that is either employed or actively seeking work) has slowly recovered during Biden’s time, from 61.3% in January 2021 to 62.6% in March.

That still leaves the rate well short of the pre-pandemic level of 63.3% for February 2020.

The rate peaked at 67.3% more than two decades ago, during the first four months of 2000. Labor Department economists project that the rate will trend down to 60.1% in 2031, “primarily because of an aging population.”

Manufacturing Jobs — During the presidential campaign, Biden promised he had a plan to create a million new manufacturing jobs — and whether it’s his doing or not, the number is rising briskly.

As of March, the U.S. added 787,000 manufacturing jobs during Biden’s time, a 6.5% increase in the space of 26 months, according to BLS. Furthermore, the March total is 198,000 or 1.5% above the number of manufacturing jobs in February 2020, before the pandemic forced plant closures and layoffs.

During Trump’s four years, the economy lost 182,000 manufacturing jobs, or 1.4%, largely due to the pandemic.

Wages and Inflation

CPI — Inflation came roaring back under Biden but has slowed dramatically in recent months.

Overall, during his first 26 months in office the Consumer Price Index rose 14.9%.

It was for a time the worst inflation in decades. The 12 months ending last June saw a 9.1% increase in the CPI (before seasonal adjustment), which the Bureau of Labor Statistics said was the biggest such increase since the 12 months ending in November 1981.

But now inflation is trending down. The CPI rose 5.0% in the most recent 12 months, 1.8% in the most recent six months and only 0.1% in March.

Gasoline Prices — The price of gasoline has gyrated wildly under Biden.

During the first year and a half of his administration, the national average price of regular gasoline at the pump soared to a record high of just over $5 per gallon (in the week ending last June 13). The rise was propelled first by motorists resuming travel and the commerce surging back after pandemic lockdowns, and then by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, which disrupted oil markets as the West attempted to punish Russia, the world’s third-largest oil producer. 

Since then, the price drifted down to a low of $3.09 the week ending Dec. 26, and now has gone up again to $3.66 the week ending April 24, the most recent on record.

That’s $1.28 higher than in the week before Biden took office, an increase of 54%.

Wages — Wages also have gone up under Biden, but not as fast as prices.

Average weekly earnings for rank-and-file workers went up 11.3% during Biden’s first 26 months in office, according to monthly figures compiled by the BLS. Those production and nonsupervisory workers make up 81% of all employees in the private sector.

But inflation ate up all that gain and more. “Real” weekly earnings, which are adjusted for inflation and measured in dollars valued at their average level in 1982-84, actually declined 3.6% since Biden took office.

That’s despite a recent upturn as inflation has moderated. Since June of last year, real earnings have gone up 1.1%.

Economic Growth

Despite two straight quarters of contraction at the beginning of 2022 and fears of a recession, the U.S. economy expanded for the full year in 2022 and continued to grow in the first quarter of 2023.

The U.S. real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product increased 2.1% in 2022 — buoyed by stronger-than-expected third and fourth quarters.

In a March 30 release, the Bureau of Economic Analysis estimated that real GDP increased in the third quarter at an annualized rate of 3.2% and in the fourth quarter at a rate of 2.6%.

The growth continued in the first quarter of 2023, but at a slower pace. In its first estimate issued April 27, the BEA said the economy increased at an annual rate of 1.1% in the first quarter.

Still, concerns about a recession remain.

The Conference Board, a nonpartisan business membership and research organization, estimates that the probability of a recession within the next 12 months stands at nearly 99%.

“While US GDP growth defied expectations in late 2022 and early 2023 data has shown unexpected strength, we continue to forecast that GDP growth to contract for three consecutive quarters starting in Q2 2023,” the Conference Board said in an April 12 report on its U.S. recession probability model, citing “the Federal Reserve’s interest rate hikes and tightening monetary policy.”

In a sustained effort to slow inflation, the Federal Reserve has repeatedly raised interest rates — most recently on March 22, when it raised rates for the ninth time in 12 months.

Corporate Profits

Under Biden, corporate profits continued to set new records — although recent quarters haven’t been as strong.

After-tax corporate profits increased for the seventh consecutive year in 2022, reaching a new high of $2.87 trillion, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The record, though, came despite a decline in growth in the last two quarters of the year.

During the third quarter of 2022, corporate profits were estimated at an annual rate of nearly $2.9 trillion — down slightly from the $3 trillion record set in the previous quarter, according to the BEA. That slide continued in the fourth quarter, when profits were running at a yearly rate of $2.7 trillion.

Even with the recent decline in growth, corporate profits were 36% higher than the full-year figure for 2020, the year before Biden took office, as estimated by the BEA. (See line 45.)

Consumer Sentiment

Consumer confidence in the economy remains stubbornly low, even falling a bit since our last report. 

The University of Michigan’s Surveys of Consumers reported that its preliminary monthly Index of Consumer Sentiment for April was 63.5. That’s down slightly from our last report – despite a slight easing recently in consumer prices — and 15.5 points lower than it was when Biden took office in January 2021.

“While consumers have noted the easing of inflation among durable goods and cars, they still expect high inflation to persist, at least in the short run,” Joanne Hsu, director of the Surveys of Consumers, said. “On net, consumers did not perceive material changes in the economic environment in April.”

Stock Markets

Under the past two presidents, the stock markets rose sharply. But that hasn’t been the case under Biden.

Since Biden took office, the S&P 500 stock index is up about 6.8% as of the close of the market on April 26.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average, which is made up of 30 large corporations, hasn’t done much better, increasing 7.7%.

And the tech-heavy NASDAQ composite index, made up of more than 3,000 companies, is down 10.2% since Biden took office, despite a surprisingly strong first quarter. Year to date, NASDAQ is up 13.3%.

Health Insurance

The latest figures from the National Health Interview Survey show that 8.7% of the population was uninsured in the third quarter of 2022 at the time they were interviewed. That compares with 10.3% of the population that was uninsured in the fourth quarter of 2020, before Biden took office.

That decrease of 1.6 percentage points is similar to the decrease we noted in our last report comparing all of 2020 to the first six months of 2022. Over that time frame, the number of people without health insurance declined by 4.2 million.

The NHIS is a program of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the data collection is performed by the Census Bureau in face-to-face interviews.

It’s possible the number, and percentage, of uninsured Americans will start to go up, now that some Medicaid provisions enacted during the coronavirus pandemic are being phased out.

As the Kaiser Family Foundation explains, in March 2020, a pandemic relief law increased the federal Medicaid funding sent to states and required states to keep Medicaid recipients continuously enrolled while the COVID-19 public health emergency was in effect. The Medicaid program is known for “churn,” meaning people lose coverage and reenroll often. This could be due to fluctuations in income that change eligibility or inability to comply with renewal requirements and checks on eligibility.

This continuous enrollment provision was one reason Medicaid enrollment has grown over the last few years, reaching nearly 95 million at the end of March. But this requirement ended on March 31, due to another law Congress passed late last year, and the enhanced federal funding during the pandemic will slowly phase out through the end of this year. KFF estimates that between 5.3 million and 14.2 million people will be disenrolled during this time. The Department of Health and Human Services says the number could be as high as 15 million, 6.8 million of whom would still be eligible for Medicaid.

Some who lose Medicaid coverage could be eligible for subsidized plans on the Affordable Care Act exchanges or other insurance, and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services required states to come up with plans on how they might mitigate loss of insurance during this so-called “unwinding” period. But KFF says the change in policy could lead to an increase in the number of people who lack health insurance.

Immigration

The number of apprehensions of people trying to enter the U.S. illegally at the southwest border remains historically high, but since our last report in January, the situation has changed markedly. In part due to seasonal trends and policies implemented by the Biden administration, the number of apprehensions significantly declined in January and February — to numbers not seen since shortly after Biden took office.

On March 24, Biden boasted that “the number of migrants arriving on our southern border has dropped precipitously.”

The number of apprehensions rose in March, but still remained well below the number from March 2022. However, an immigration expert cautioned the U.S. may be seeing the “calm before the storm” should the Biden administration end Title 42, a public health law the Trump administration invoked early in the pandemic that allows border officials to immediately return many of those caught trying to enter the country illegally.

Looking at the entirety of Biden’s time in office, and to even out the seasonal changes in border crossings, we compare the most recent 12 months on record with the year prior to him taking office. And for the past 12 months ending in March, the latest figures available, apprehensions totaled 2,246,798, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. That’s 342% higher than during Trump’s last year in office.

Apprehensions by the U.S. Border Patrol hit 221,710 in December, the second highest monthly total on record. But in January, that number dropped nearly 42% to 128,936. And it remained about the same in February, at 130,024. (Those figures were 13% and 18% lower than the same months in 2022.) The number rose in March to 162,317, though that’s 23% below the level in March 2022.

According to Ariel G. Ruiz Soto, an associate policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, part of the drop was likely due to seasonal factors. January tends to be a slow month for illegal immigration, because of the holiday season across Latin America.

But Biden administration policies also played a role, he said. In early January, Biden unveiled several border enforcement initiatives that included expanding the “parole” process for Venezuelans to Nicaraguans, Haitians and Cubans, allowing applicants a two-year work permit if they have a sponsor in the U.S. and they pass a background check.

At the same time, the administration expanded Title 42 to include Nicaragua, Cuba and Haiti, meaning people from those countries caught illegally crossing into the U.S. could be immediately expelled.

Those changes contributed to the declining number of apprehensions at the border to a more manageable level in January and February, Ruiz Soto said. But that may change dramatically if the Biden administration follows through with its plan to end Title 42 on May 11, when the policy is set to expire, he said.

“That could incentivize increased migration in April,” Ruiz Soto said, and could lead to a “significant surge” in May. If so, he said, the decline in apprehensions in January and February could prove to have been just a temporary lull.

In anticipation of the end of Title 42, the Biden administration has been increasing expedited removals under Title 8, which stipulates that someone caught trying to cross illegally is barred from legal entry for five years. Those caught attempting to cross illegally multiple times can be charged criminally.

In addition, the administration is also pursuing a rule that would mean those attempting to cross into the U.S. illegally would have a “presumption of asylum ineligibility” in the U.S. if they have failed to seek asylum in another country on their travels to the U.S.

Even with the lower numbers in January and February, the number of apprehensions remains historically very high under Biden. Part of that is due to the same people making multiple attempts to cross the border, what is known as the recidivism rate. Title 42 carries no consequences for Mexicans immediately turned around at the border, Ruiz Soto said, and so many of them try again repeatedly.

In addition, he said, there are some “push factors” encouraging migration by Mexicans. One factor is an increase in drug and cartel activity in Mexico, Ruiz Soto said. In addition, he said, “Mexico has really struggled to recover from the pandemic.”

Food Stamps

The number of people in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, formerly known as food stamps, increased again since our last update.

As of January, nearly 42.7 million people were receiving food assistance, the highest monthly enrollment since Biden has been in office. That figure is up 344,515 people from October, and it’s an increase of about 1.2%, or 504,274 people, from January 2021, when Biden became president. The figures come from Department of Agriculture data published this month.

Under Biden, SNAP enrollment was as low as 40.8 million in August and September 2021. Trump’s lowest month was February 2020, when the program had 36.9 million participants.

Trade Deficit

The international trade deficit has gone up under Biden.

Figures published this month by the Bureau of Economic Analysis show the U.S. imported about $909.8 billion more in goods and services than it exported over the last 12 months through February. That’s an increase of nearly $256 billion, or roughly 39%, compared with 2020.

Through the first two months of 2023, however, the trade gap in goods and services decreased $35.5 billion, or 20.3%, from the same period in 2022, the BEA said. The $945.3 billion trade deficit in 2022 was the largest on record going back to 1960.

Crude Oil Production and Imports

U.S. crude oil production averaged roughly 11.97 million barrels per day during Biden’s most recent 12 months in office (through January), according to Energy Information Administration data released in March. That was 5.7% higher than the average daily amount of crude oil produced in 2020.

Crude oil production averaged 11.88 million barrels per day throughout 2022, the EIA said. That’s the highest annual average since 2019. According to its Short-Term Energy Outlook published in April, the EIA expects crude oil production to increase to a record 12.54 million barrels per day in 2023.

Meanwhile, imports of crude oil averaged 6.27 million barrels per day in Biden’s last 12 months. That’s up nearly 6.7% from average daily imports in 2020.

The EIA projects crude oil imports will exceed exports by 2.85 million barrels per day in 2023 — which is a 6.7% increase in net imports from 2020 to 2022.

Carbon Emissions

Last year, there were about 4.96 billion metric tons of emissions from the consumption of coal, natural gas and various petroleum products, according to the EIA. That total is 1.2% more than in 2021 and 8.4% above 2020.

The EIA currently forecasts that the U.S. will have 4.79 billion metric tons of energy-related emissions in 2023. That would be a decline of 3.4% from 2022 and almost 7% below the 5.15 billion metric tons emitted pre-pandemic in 2019.

Debt and Deficits

Debt — Since our last quarterly update, the public debt, which excludes money the government owes itself, has changed only slightly. It increased $9.1 billion to over $24.6 trillion, as of April 24, bringing the total increase under Biden to $2.97 trillion. That’s 13.7% higher than it was when Biden took office — unchanged from our last report.

Deficits — So far, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the budget deficit for fiscal year 2023 is ahead of where it was at this point in fiscal 2022, when the Treasury Department said the deficit for the full fiscal cycle approached $1.38 trillion.

Through the first six months of the current fiscal year (October to March), the deficit was $1.1 trillion, or “$430 billion more than the shortfall recorded during the same period last year,” the CBO said in its most recent Monthly Budget Review.

In February, the CBO projected that the FY 2023 deficit would increase slightly to $1.41 trillion. That’s $426 billion more than it projected in May 2022, CBO said.

Gun Sales

Gun purchases appeared to decline again during the first quarter of 2023, according to numbers from the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a gun industry trade group.

The NSSF estimates gun sales by tracking the number of background checks for firearm sales based on the FBI’s National Instant Background Check System, or NICS. The NSSF-adjusted figures exclude background checks unrelated to sales, such as those required for concealed-carry permits. We rely on these figures because the federal government doesn’t collect data on gun sales.

The NSSF-adjusted NICS total for background checks during the first three months of 2023 was about 4.17 million, the group reported. That’s down more than 1% from 4.21 million in the first quarter of 2022 and almost 24% lower than the first quarter of 2021.

The first quarter figure for 2023 is about 26% lower than the almost 5.63 million during Trump’s last quarter in 2020, which was a record year for background checks for firearm sales.

Crime

The number of murders in 70 large U.S. cities went up by 1.6% from 2020 to 2022, according to the latest reports from the Major Cities Chiefs Association.

The small increase reflects a decline in murders last year (down 5.1%) after two straight years of increases — a 33.4% jump from 2019 to 2020, before Biden took office (based on statistics from 67 large cities) and a much smaller 6.2% increase from 2020 to 2021, Biden’s first year in office (based on 70 large cities).

Despite last year’s decrease, the number of murders — 9,138 in 2022 — is not back down to the pre-pandemic 2019 level, which totaled 6,406, though the latter figure is based on three fewer law enforcement agencies.

AH Datalytics, an independent criminal justice data analysis group, has found murders are continuing to go down in 2023. Its work, based on publicly available information from 73 large law enforcement agencies nationwide, shows a 10.2% decline in murders as of April 26, compared with the same period last year — with more than half of the agencies’ figures updated as of this month. 

From 2020 to 2022, the Major Cities Chiefs Association also found a 7.5% increase in the number of rapes, a 1.8% rise in robberies and a 14.1% increase in aggravated assaults.

We won’t have nationwide crime figures from the FBI for 2022 until this fall. As we’ve reported in our last two Biden’s Numbers updates, the FBI estimated that “violent and property crime remained consistent between 2020 and 2021.”

There have been several mass murders in the country in the last few years, including the May 2022 killings of 19 students and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, and 10 people in a racially motivated attack at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, and more recently, the killing of three children and three adults at a school in Nashville in March. In response to these mass shootings, Biden has repeatedly called for a ban on semi-automatic weapons and large capacity magazines.

The Gun Violence Archive determined there were 36 mass murders in 2022, compared with 28 in 2021, 21 in 2020 and 31 in 2019. The group defines “mass murder” as a single incident in which at least four people were killed, not including the shooter.

Another gun violence database created by Mother Jones provides a count of “mass shootings,” defined as three or more victims in a shooting in a public place. Unlike in the Gun Violence Archives database, incidents in private homes or stemming from gang activity or robberies are not included. Mother Jones found 12 mass shootings in 2022, six in 2021, two in 2020 and 10 in 2019.

The FBI maintains statistics on what it calls “active shooter” incidents, in which “one or more individuals” is “actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area.” There were 50 active shooter incidents in 2022, 61 in 2021, 40 in 2020 and 28 in 2019.

Judiciary Appointments

Supreme Court — Biden’s Supreme Court nominees still stand at one: Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who was confirmed on April 7, 2022, and replaced retired Justice Stephen G. Breyer, an appointee of President Bill Clinton. Trump had won confirmation for two — Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh — at the same point during his term.

Court of Appeals — Under Biden, 31 U.S. Court of Appeals judges have been confirmed. At the same point under Trump, 37 had been confirmed.

District Court — Biden has racked up 87 District Court confirmations, while Trump had 58 nominees confirmed at the same time during his presidency.

Two U.S. Court of Federal Claims judges also have been confirmed under Biden.

As of April 19, there were 78 federal court vacancies, with 36 nominees pending.

Home Prices & Homeownership

Home prices — The Fed’s attempts to slow inflation by repeatedly raising interest rates put the brakes on home prices last year. But the median price of existing, single-family homes has started to climb again.

The median price of an existing, single-family home sold in March was $380,000, according to the National Association of Realtors. That’s down from a year ago ($385,400), but it’s also the second consecutive month that home prices had gone up after a seven-month slide, NAR data show.

“While prices have dropped from where they were at their peak this time last year, they are still above 2021 prices in many markets,” Lindsay McLean, the CEO of HomeLister told gobankingrates.com. “Mortgage rates have stabilized a bit and offer activity seems to be resuming, as buyers are slowly coming back to the table.”

The Fed began raising interest rates on March 16, 2022, increasing rates last month for the ninth time in 12 months.

The median price of an existing, single-family home reached a high of $420,900 in June, according to the NAR. But, as mortgage rates continued to climb, prices tumbled for seven consecutive months, dropping to $365,400 in January.

Despite the swing in prices, the March median price was 23.4% higher than it had been in January 2021, when Biden took office. Annual home prices have been rising since 2012, in large part because of a high demand and relatively low inventory, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.

Homeownership — Homeownership rates have remained virtually unchanged under Biden.

The homeownership rate, which the Census Bureau measures as the percentage of “occupied housing units that are owner-occupied,” was 65.9% in the fourth quarter of 2022 — similar to the 65.8% rate during Trump’s last quarter in office. (Usual word of caution: The bureau warns against making comparisons with the fourth quarter of 2020, because of pandemic-related restrictions on in-person data collection.) 

The rate peaked under Trump in the second quarter of 2020 at 67.9%. The highest homeownership rate on record was 69.2% in 2004, when George W. Bush was president.

Refugees

Biden remains far from fulfilling his ambitious campaign goal of accepting up to 125,000 refugees a year.

As president, Biden set the cap on refugee admissions for fiscal year 2023 at 125,000 – just as he did in fiscal year 2022. To achieve that goal, the administration would have to admit an average of 10,417 refugees per month.

However, in fiscal year 2022, the administration accepted only 25,465 refugees, or 2,122 per month, according to State Department data. In the first six months of fiscal year 2023, which began Oct. 1, the administration increased its monthly average, welcoming 18,429 refugees, or 3,072 per month. (See “Refugee Admissions Report” for monthly data from 2000 through 2023.)

Overall, the U.S. has admitted 53,904 refugees in Biden’s first full 26 months in office, or 2,073 refugees per month, the data show. That’s about 12% higher than the 1,845 monthly average during the four years under Trump, who significantly reduced the admission of refugees. (Technical point: For both presidents, our monthly averages include only full months in office, excluding the month of January 2017 and January 2021, when administrations overlapped.)

In its report to Congress for fiscal year 2023, the State Department said “we are beginning to make progress towards fulfilling President Biden’s ambitious admissions target.” It is true that the average monthly refugee admissions have increased under Biden. The 3,072 monthly average in the first six months of fiscal year 2023 is the highest it has been for the same six-month period since fiscal year 2017, which includes months under both Trump and his predecessor, President Barack Obama.

But if it maintains its current pace, the administration would accept 36,864 refugees in fiscal year 2023 — which is much higher than last fiscal year, but far short of Biden’s campaign goal of 125,000.

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In his first 2024 campaign rally in Waco, Texas, and in a recent interview, former President Donald Trump repeated many claims we’ve fact-checked before — but he also made new false and unsupported statements:

• In talking about the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago, Trump may have left the false impression that an $18 million settlement in a case involving former President Richard Nixon was relevant to his situation.

• Trump claimed that South American countries are emptying their prisons and “mental institutions” and sending those people to the U.S., but immigration experts tell us there is no evidence of that happening.

• The former president called the official count of drug overdose deaths a “lie” and claimed without evidence that the figure is “probably” five times higher. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told us that “any undercount” in overall drug overdose deaths “should be relatively small.”

Nixon Settlement Not Relevant to Trump

In talking about the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago for classified documents Trump took when he left the White House, the former president may have left the false impression that his situation was comparable to former President Richard Nixon.

Trump mentioned an $18 million settlement in a case about Nixon’s presidential materials, including the infamous Watergate tapes. But that case has nothing to do with the Presidential Records Act, which established that all presidential records, starting with those of President Ronald Reagan, are the property of the United States. When a president leaves office, the archivist of the U.S. takes custody of those records.

In a Fox News interview that aired March 27, Trump told host Sean Hannity: “This is the Presidential Records Act. I have the right to take stuff. Do you know that they ended up paying Richard Nixon, I think, $18 million for what he had? They did the Presidential Records Act. I have the right to take stuff. I have the right to look at stuff. But they have the right to talk, and we have the right to talk. This would have all been worked out. All of a sudden, they raided Mar-a-Lago, viciously raided Mar-a-Lago.”

We’ll explain what happened with that $18 million settlement — an amount that did not actually go to Nixon or his heirs.

But first, Trump doesn’t “have the right to take stuff,” unless that “stuff” is purely personal, not presidential. The Presidential Records Act says: “Upon the conclusion of a President’s term of office … the Archivist of the United States shall assume responsibility for the custody, control, and preservation of, and access to, the Presidential records of that President.” The archivist then “shall have an affirmative duty to make such records available to the public as rapidly and completely as possible.”

Furthermore, Trump’s claim that the dispute over presidential materials he took “would have all been worked out” through talking, without the need for an FBI search, ignores that Trump took eight months to comply with National Archives and Records Administration’s requests for boxes of presidential documents he had stored at his Mar-a-Lago home. Once the National Archives discovered classified documents among those records and referred the matter to the Department of Justice, Trump’s lawyers, in responding to a subpoena, handed over a single envelope with 38 classified documents, attested that a “diligent search” hadn’t turned up any more, and prohibited the DOJ from inspecting boxes of materials still housed at Mar-a-Lago.

A few more months after that, the FBI obtained a court-approved search warrant and retrieved 13 boxes that “contained documents with classification markings, and in all, over one hundred unique documents with classification markings,” according to a DOJ court filing. We’ve explained all of that before.

Now, back to the Nixon case.

Before the Presidential Records Act — which was signed into law in 1978 and applied to White House materials beginning in 1981 — records that a president created were considered to be the president’s private property. They could keep, destroy or donate the documents to the United States, as several presidents did, to be housed in presidential libraries. But once Nixon, after resigning in 1974, wanted to destroy tape recordings that documented White House activities regarding the Watergate scandal, Congress passed the Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act. That law said that the National Archives would have “complete possession and control” of White House recordings from Nixon’s presidency and all other historical documents.

The law only applied to Nixon, as the National Archives explains.

Nixon sued. The former president’s case challenging the law went to the Supreme Court, which ruled against him in 1977, finding that the act was constitutional. Nixon then sued for compensation from the federal government under the takings clause of the Fifth Amendment. That clause says that the government shall not take “private property … for public use, without just compensation.”

In 1992, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that Nixon was entitled to compensation. The court said that because there had been “a tradition of presidential ownership of White House papers,” Nixon had a “property interest” in his papers and materials — which amounted to more than 40 million items. Under the Constitution, the court said, “just compensation” was required because the government took that property.

The appeals court sent the case back to the District Court to decide what that compensation should be.

The federal government thought it should be zero dollars, while the Nixon team wanted more than $200 million — a sum that factored in 25 years of interest.

“I thought we had a decent case,” Neil H. Koslowe, the lead counsel for the U.S. on this case and now a partner at Potomac Law Group, told us of the federal government’s argument during a monthslong trial. But before the judge made a decision, the Nixon team proposed a settlement. “My superiors at the Department of Justice decided to accept it.”

The protracted legal battle final ended in the $18 million settlement in 2000.

Nixon had died in 1994, and his heirs actually got very little of that $18 million. When the settlement was announced, news organizations reported that Nixon’s representatives said the lawyers would get $7.4 million and the Nixon Foundation would get $6 million for a presidential library. After millions in taxes were paid, Nixon’s two daughters were left with about $90,000.

Trump’s mention of the case might leave the false impression that he, or other presidents, could be entitled to compensation as well. They’re not. No president since Reagan could even attempt to make the legal arguments Nixon did because of the Presidential Records Act, which made presidential records public, not personal, property.

“It’s no longer possible … for any president to assert ownership,” Koslowe told us. That’s gone. … That’s the whole point of the Presidential Records Act.”

Jason R. Baron, professor of the practice at the University of Maryland and former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration, echoed that comment.

Under the PRA, Baron told us in an email, “presidential records are owned by the American people, not the president himself. The records of every president from Ronald Reagan to President Biden are covered under the PRA. When President Trump’s term in office ended on January 20, 2021, all of his presidential records were required to be transferred to the National Archives and Records Administration. President Trump has no right to be compensated for the lawful return of documents into government custody that he does not and has never owned.”

The Nixon case is an interesting piece of history, but it has no parallels to Trump’s situation.

Illegal Immigration

Trump claimed in his March 25 Waco rally and the Fox News interview that countries in South America are emptying their prisons and institutions for people with mental illness and sending those people to the U.S., but we could find no evidence of that.

Speaking about illegal immigration at the Waco rally, Trump said, “Other countries are emptying out their prisons, insane asylums and mental institutions and sending their most heinous criminals to the United States. And who can blame them? Who can blame them? Right? These are very smart people, the presidents and the heads of these countries, presidents, prime ministers, and dictators, I know them all. But they’re very smart, very streetwise, and they’re sending their criminals to live in the United States.”

“I read a story recently, where a doctor in a mental institution, in a certain country in South America is saying, ‘My whole life, I’ve been so busy taking care of people, but now, I have no people to take care of, because they’re all being sent into the United States,'” Trump added. “And I said, ‘How stupid are we?'”

Trump made a similar claim during his interview on Fox News.

“You know, the prisons are being emptied out all over South America and they’re being dropped — the people are being dropped into our country,” Trump said. “The mental institutions are being emptied out all over South America, but much more than that, all over the world. And they are traveling in through our southern border.”

There is actually historical precedent for such a thing.

In 1980, Cuban leader Fidel Castro allowed the mass migration of some 125,000 Cubans to the U.S. in what was known as the Mariel boatlift.

“Most were true refugees, many had families here, and the great majority has settled into American communities without mishap,” the Washington Post wrote in 1983. “But the Cuban dictator played a cruel joke. He opened his jails and mental hospitals and put their inmates on the boats too.”

According to the Post, about 22,000 of the new arrivals “freely admitted that they were convicts.” Some were political prisoners, but others were convicts who had committed serious felonies, including violent crimes.

But there is no evidence of such a thing happening now.

There has been a spike in immigrants from South America in recent years due to political instability and economic free fall, Michelle Mittelstadt, director of communications for the Migration Policy Institute, told us in a phone interview.

More than 7 million Venezuelans have left the country since 2015, she said. The vast majority relocated to other countries within the region. Colombia alone, she said, has taken in about 2 million of them.

“This region of the world has experienced the greatest economic devastation as a result of the pandemic,” she said. “Everyone in the region is hurting significantly.”

Some of those who fled their home country in South America and southern Central America continued on to the U.S. In fiscal year 2022, the number of immigrants coming from Venezuela encountered at the southern border surged to more than 187,000. Another nearly 125,000 people came from Colombia, nearly 51,000 from Brazil and nearly 24,000 from Ecuador.

In fiscal year 2022, immigrants from countries outside of Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras — the typical main feeders of immigration into the U.S. — made up about 42% of unauthorized encounters at the border. Five years ago, Mittelstadt said, it was just 4%.

The question, then, is not whether the U.S. has seen a surge in immigrants from South America and southern Central America. It has. The question is whether, as Trump claims, governments in some South American countries are emptying their prisons and institutions for people with mental illness and shipping those people to the U.S. border.

The experts we spoke to said the claim lacks evidence, and is otherwise dubious.

“I cannot prove this is false, but I follow migration in Latin America and the Caribbean quite closely and have never ever heard anything like this related to current migration from the region,” Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute, told us via email. “I have never heard any credible claims that any country has been emptying its prisons or mental hospitals so that those released can migrate to the United States.”

Adam Isacson, director for defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America, said he’s similarly stumped.

“It’s hard to prove a negative — nobody’s writing a report saying ‘Ecuador is not opening its mental institutions’ — but what I can say is that I work full-time on migration, am on many coalition mailing lists, correspond constantly with partners in the region, and scan 300+ RSS feeds and Twitter lists of press outlets and activists region wide, and I have not seen a single report indicating that this is happening,” Isacson told us via email.

“As far as I can tell, it’s a total fabrication,” Isacson added.

That’s not to say some criminals aren’t attempting to migrate to the U.S.

According to data provided by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, officers encountered nearly 17,000 criminal noncitizens at ports of entry in FY 2022, and another nearly 8,000 in FY 2023 so far. They are “inadmissible, absent extenuating circumstances,” CBP explains in a footnote.

In between points of entry, Border Patrol officers encountered another nearly 13,000 noncitizens who had criminal convictions or were wanted by law enforcement in FY 2022, and more than 4,000 more so far in FY 2023. Those figures represent convictions for crimes either in the U.S. or abroad, “so long as the conviction is for conduct which is deemed criminal by the United States,” according to CBP. In FY 2022, that included 1,142 people with convictions for assault, 62 for homicide or manslaughter, and 365 for sexual offenses. The data do not identify the country from which these criminals were attempting to emigrate.

“The U.S. Border Patrol conducts vetting on every individual encountered illegally entering the United States,” a spokesman for Customs and Border Protection told us via email. “That vetting includes the collection of biographical and biometric information that is run through all available databases to check for criminal history and any other potentially derogatory information.”

CBP did not detail, however, how it checks criminal records of people coming from a country such as Venezuela, which has not had diplomatic relations with the United States since 2019.

Although a press contact for Trump did not respond to our inquiry seeking backup for the former president’s claims, back in September, Trump made a similar claim about a South American country, Venezuela, that has its roots in a Sept. 18 story by the conservative news outlet Breitbart.

“This week it was reported that Border Patrol agents have received an intelligence bulletin stating that Venezuelan dictator Maduro is opening up all of his prisons and sending vicious convicts — and these are tough ones charged with murder, rape and other heinous crimes — straight across the border and into our wide open USA,” Trump said at a political rally in Wilmington, North Carolina, on Sept. 23. Trump added that in addition to Venezuela, “countries all over the world are doing it.”

In that instance, Trump was citing a Breitbart story written by Randy Clark, a former employee of the U.S. Border Patrol, who claimed, “A recent Department of Homeland Security intelligence report received by the Border Patrol instructs agents to look for Venezuelan inmates released from entering the U.S., according to a source within CBP. The report, reviewed by Breitbart Texas, indicates the Venezuelan government, under the leadership of Nicolás Maduro Moros, is purposely freeing inmates — including some convicted of murder, rape, and extortion.

“The intelligence report warns agents the freed prisoners have been seen within migrant caravans traveling from Tapachula, Mexico toward the U.S.-Mexico border as recently as July,” Clark wrote.

That story prompted a letter from 14 members of Congress to U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas demanding information on reports that Venezuela “is deliberately releasing violent prisoners early,” and “pushing them to join caravans heading to the United States.”

The Breitbart story was based on an unnamed “source within CBP” and on an alleged Homeland Security intelligence report to CBP. But we were unable to surface that report.

Although the story describes the prison release as “deliberate,” it also states: “The report does not specify that the release of the convicts — understanding they would head to the United States — could be a purposeful geopolitical move specifically intended to impact U.S. national security.”

A spokesman for CBP told us, “It is the policy of CBP to neither confirm nor speak to potentially improperly disclosed internal documents marked as law enforcement sensitive or for official use only.”

If there were concerns about freed prisoners embedded in caravans, Isacson told us, “no ‘caravan’ has successfully reached the US border since late 2018. There’ve been some protests to press Mexico for travel visas or faster asylum decisions, but I know of only one caravan that made it as far as Mexico City, and that was just a few stragglers after more than a month.”

Responding to Trump’s comments in September, elDetector, a fact-checking operation at Univision, in October quoted Carolina Girón, general coordinator of the Venezuelan Prison Observatory, as saying, “Venezuelan prisons have not been emptied. The population of inmates in prisons is close to 32,000 people, when there is an installed capacity of only 21,000. We have 170% overcrowding.”

As for the allegation about South American countries sending people with mental illness to the U.S., we couldn’t find any substantiation for that either.

“There is no evidence that I have been able to find that demonstrates an increase of immigrants with severe mental illness coming into the country or coming into facilities,” Pierluigi Mancini, an expert on immigrant behavioral health, told us.

Mancini, who recently led an effort to train clinicians in Latin America dealing with the millions of displaced Venezuelans, said, “I have done work in several countries in Latin America, and I have not found any evidence that people with mental illness who are in prison in South America are being released and shipped to the United States.”

Drug Overdose Deaths

There were 106,699 deaths from drug overdoses in 2021, up more than 16% from 2020, according to the most recent figures from the National Center for Health Statistics, a division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

But in his Waco remarks, Trump called those numbers a “lie” and claimed — without evidence — that the total of annual deaths is “probably” about five times as high.

“People talk about the people that are pouring in, but the drugs that are pouring into our country, killing everybody, killing so many people, that’s another lie, Dan, because they keep talking about a hundred thousand people, 75,000 people,” Trump said, talking to Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who was in attendance. “I’ve been hearing that number for 15 years. It’s hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people, probably a half a million people, and nobody wants to say it.”

While the official count of annual overdose deaths has increased almost every year since at least 1999, the totals did not top 70,000 until 2017, during Trump’s administration, and they did not exceed 100,000 until 2021. So Trump has not been hearing those figures from the government for over a decade.

Furthermore, Trump’s campaign did not provide any documentation to back up his assertion that the actual number of yearly drug overdose deaths is closer to 500,000.

Christopher Ruhm, a University of Virginia professor of public policy and economics, told us that was a reason to be skeptical of Trump’s figure.

“Without supporting evidence or a detailed methodology, I would be very dubious of that claim,” he said in a phone interview.

Ruhm and other researchers have written papers concluding that overdose deaths due to certain drugs, particularly opioids, were underreported for years – primarily because many death certificates did not specify the drug or drugs that caused the overdose. He said that “undercount has fallen over time,” as reporting on death records has improved.

“I have not yet seen convincing evidence that the number of overall drug deaths is drastically underreported or even necessarily underreported at all,” he said.

In a statement to FactCheck.org, Merianne Spencer, a CDC researcher, said that “any undercount” in total drug overdose deaths due to pending death investigations would likely be minimal.

“There is no evidence to suggest that ‘hundreds and hundreds of thousands’ of drug overdose deaths are not being reported,” Spencer said.

She explained that the NCHS publishes its figures based on certified death records, which are filled out by state and local medical examiners, and then submitted to the NCHS by state and local vital records offices.

“It is reasonable to note that the cause-of-death certifier’s determination relies on their expertise; they make their determinations based on what information and evidence is available to them,” she said. “While we believe that there could be an undercount due to some overdose deaths still pending investigation at the close of the mortality files at the end of each year, any undercount should be relatively small.”

Trump Repeats

The former president also repeated several false and misleading claims in his interview and at his rally, including these:

• In Waco, Trump said the FBI “shouldn’t have raided” Mar-a-Lago on Aug. 8, because during an earlier visit government agents could have reviewed and taken classified documents. That’s false. On June 3, government officials toured a Mar-a-Lago storage room, which the Department of Justice has said contained about 50 to 55 boxes. But Trump’s lawyer “explicitly prohibited government personnel from opening or looking inside any of the boxes that remained in the storage room,” a DOJ court filing said.

• In his interview with Hannity, Trump said, “Look, here’s a letter from Stormy Daniels saying we never had an affair.” As we wrote, Daniels has said she signed the letter in 2018 under pressure. “[T]hey made it sound like I had no choice,” she said in a March 2018 “60 Minutes” interview.

• Trump downplayed his mishandling of classified documents, telling Hannity: “Joe Biden has got 1,850 boxes … in Delaware. Think of that, 1,850 boxes.” That’s misleading. As we’ve written, Biden in 2012 donated more than 1,850 boxes of records from his years in the U.S. Senate to the University of Delaware. The Justice Department, with Biden’s consent, reviewed the documents and did not find any with classified markings, although some were taken for further review, CBS News has reported.

• In Waco, Trump repeated the false claim that he “ended Nord Stream 2,” referring to a Russian pipeline that would have doubled the export of Russian natural gas to Germany. As we’ve written, Trump signed a bill in 2019 that included sanctions against companies building the pipeline. Construction was suspended, but resumed a year later, while Trump was in office. The pipeline has never gone into service, because German Chancellor Olaf Scholz stopped the certification process last year.

• In Waco, Trump once again falsely asserted that his administration was the first to put tariffs on Chinese goods. “No other president took anything out of China,” he said. “Not 25 cents.” That’s patently false. We’ve written on multiple occasions that the U.S. has collected billions in tariffs on Chinese imports long before Trump took office.

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The nearly 50 migrants Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis flew from San Antonio to Martha’s Vineyard in September were later moved to a shelter at a military base several miles away in Massachusetts. After that, most of them found housing in other parts of the state.

The migrants were not immediately “deported” after arriving at the popular vacation island off the Massachusetts coast, as DeSantis wrongly claimed this month.

DeSantis, a Republican who may run for president in 2024, made the claim during a speech in Iowa on March 10. While discussing his state’s approach to border security, DeSantis said to cheers and applause: “We even were able to deliver 50 illegal aliens to beautiful Martha’s Vineyard. They said they were a sanctuary area. They had signs saying nobody is illegal. They said all the refugees and the illegals are welcome and then they deported them the next day. Are you kidding me?”

His statement could have given his audience the false impression that the migrants, most of whom had traveled from Venezuela, were expelled from the United States. That did not happen.

In fact, because individuals working on behalf of the DeSantis administration allegedly coerced the migrants to fly from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard under “false pretenses,” according to a Texas county sheriff, the migrants may qualify for a special immigration status for victims of certain crimes.

If approved, the migrants could stay in the U.S. to assist in a criminal investigation of the flights launched by the county sheriff’s department. After several years, they could eventually apply to become legal permanent residents.

From San Antonio to Martha’s Vineyard

DeSantis took credit for using Florida funds to charter the two private planes that flew the migrants from San Antonio to Martha’s Vineyard on Sept. 14. Days earlier, in a speech to GOP donors, DeSantis teased potentially sending people who cross the U.S. border illegally to the island, where about 20,000 people live year-round. He said he might do so to help relieve southern border states dealing with a huge spike in unauthorized crossings into the country.

At a December 2021 press conference, DeSantis said the Biden administration would secure the border “the next day,” if migrants started showing up in President Joe Biden’s home state of Delaware, or in Martha’s Vineyard, where many Democrats, including former President Barack Obama, have homes. 

But local authorities on the island were given no notice prior to the migrants being dropped off at the Martha’s Vineyard airport on Sept. 14. Two days later, after local officials, organizations and residents had scrambled to provide aid to the new arrivals, then-Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker, also a Republican, announced that the migrants would be given the option to move about 30 miles away to a more suitable emergency shelter at the state’s Joint Base Cape Cod in Barnstable County.

“Shortly after the arrival of these individuals, Martha’s Vineyard residents joined with local and state officials to create temporary shelter and provide necessities in a moment of urgent need,” Baker said in a released statement. “However, the island communities are not equipped to provide sustainable accommodation, and state officials developed a plan to deliver a comprehensive humanitarian response. On Friday, September 16, the Commonwealth will offer transportation to a new temporary shelter on JBCC. This move will be voluntary.”

But relocating is not the same as being “deported,” as DeSantis claimed had happened.

Deportation refers to removing citizens of other countries from the U.S. for violating immigration law. The removals are carried out by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and deportees are usually returned to their home country or another nation that will take them in.

“None of the 49 have been deported from the United States,” Rachel Self, an immigration and criminal defense attorney, told FactCheck.org by phone. Self, whose office is in Boston, has been working with several of the migrants since they were taken to the island last year.

A spokesperson for the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, which is representing nine of the migrants, told us its organization is also unaware of any migrants on those flights being deported.

We asked DeSantis’ office to clarify his deportation claim, but we did not receive a response. 

As of early October, all of the migrants had left the emergency shelter at Joint Base Cape Cod and transitioned to more long-term housing, Baker’s office announced. Two of the migrants reportedly traveled to New York, while the vast majority moved to other cities or towns in Massachusetts, including four migrants — all related — who went back to Martha’s Vineyard to live temporarily with a local family.  

Because of the methods used to get the migrants from Texas to Massachusetts, DeSantis may have helped protect them from deportation. That’s because lawyers representing the migrants, and Javier Salazar, the Democratic sheriff of the Texas county where at least some of them had been staying pending their immigration hearings, have argued that the migrants were manipulated into flying to Martha’s Vineyard with false promises of jobs and housing — making them victims of a crime. 

For example, according to a class-action lawsuit filed against DeSantis and Florida Transportation Secretary Jared Perdue in September, some of the migrants said they were told by a woman organizing their travel from San Antonio that they would be flying to either Boston or Washington, D.C. Another person told reporters that he thought he was going to Philadelphia, where he planned to stay with a family friend and was scheduled to meet with U.S. immigration officials. 

It was not until they were in the air that the migrants learned of their true destination, some of them said. 

Salazar’s office in Bexar County, Texas, launched a criminal investigation on Sept. 19, and he later signed certificates attesting that the migrants, whom members of his staff interviewed, had assisted in the investigation. The certifications made them eligible to apply for a special “U visa” that is meant for victims of “certain crimes who have suffered mental or physical abuse and are helpful to law enforcement or government officials” investigating criminal activity.

The migrants, who Self said also have applied for asylum, are unlikely to be deported while their U visa applications are being processed. And due to a backlog of more than 300,000 such petitions, it could be a while before their applications even come up for review.

If their U visa applications are approved, the migrants would be able to lawfully stay in the U.S. for at least four years, get work authorization and eventually apply for legal permanent resident status.

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President Joe Biden, who recently made his first visit as president to the southern border, and Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who greeted Biden in Texas, offered competing versions of who’s to blame for a spike in illegal immigration. But both twisted some facts to fit their partisan narratives.

In remarks prior to his trip to his Jan. 8 trip to El Paso, Texas, Biden said that on his first day in office he proposed a comprehensive plan to “overhaul … a broken immigration system” but that “congressional Republicans have refused to consider” his plan. Republicans opposed his plan, but the bill never came up for a vote because it also did not appear to have enough support among Democrats.

In a letter he hand-delivered to Biden, Abbott claimed, “Under President [Donald] Trump, the federal government achieved historically low levels of illegal immigration,” and “by contrast, America is suffering the worst illegal immigration in the history of our country” under Biden. Apprehensions of immigrants entering the U.S. illegally have soared in Biden’s presidency, but apprehensions were not at historic lows under Trump.

In fact, after falling in his first year in office, apprehensions rose in 2018, spiked in 2019 and were higher in 2020, Trump’s last year in office, than the year before he took office in 2017.

As a record number of migrants continue to attempt to cross illegally into the U.S., Biden has faced growing criticism from Republicans for failing to address what Biden has acknowledged is a “difficult challenge.”

In remarks to reporters from the White House ahead of his trip, Biden blamed Republicans for the problems at the border, while in Abbott’s letter to the president, he accused Biden of enacting “open-border policies” that violated the president’s “constitutional obligation to defend the States against invasion through faithful execution of federal laws.”

We’ll sort through two misleading points each made in making their case.

Biden Blames Republicans

In his remarks on border security and enforcement on Jan. 5, Biden outlined executive actions he planned to take to deal with “our situation in the southwest border.” Since Biden took office, just over 4 million people have been apprehended by border patrol agents while attempting to cross the border illegally.

As we wrote in our last “Biden’s Numbers” story in October, that represents a historically high surge, and apprehensions over the last 12 months have more than tripled compared with the number of apprehensions in Trump’s final year in office.

While Republicans have blamed Biden for the surge — we have detailed some of the factors beyond his control as well — Biden laid blame for the problem on Republicans.

“On my first day in office … I sent Congress a comprehensive piece of legislation that would completely overhaul what has been a broken immigration system for a long time: cracking down on illegal immigration; strengthening legal immigration; and protecting DREAMers, those with temporary protected status, and farmworkers, who all are part of the fabric of our nation,” Biden said. “But congressional Republicans have refused to consider my comprehensive plan.”

Biden accused Republicans of “using immigration to try to score political points” even as they “reject solutions” that could improve what he said has become “a difficult problem” at the border.

It’s true that on his first day in office, Biden sent Congress an immigration bill that he said would “restore humanity and American values to our immigration system.” The proposal would have provided a pathway to citizenship for many of those currently in the country illegally, increased diversity visas and increased assistance to countries such as El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, the country of origin for many of the immigrants trying to cross the border at that time.

The bill also sought additional funding to “implement a plan to deploy technology to expedite screening and enhance the ability to identify narcotics and other contraband at every land, air, and sea port of entry.”

Based on Biden’s plan, the following month, in February 2021, Democratic Rep. Linda Sanchez formally introduced the U.S. Citizenship Act in the House. An identical bill was introduced in the Senate by Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez.

The New York Times described the bill as “a lengthy wish list for pro-immigration activists and a down payment on Mr. Biden’s campaign promise to provide a path to citizenship for 11 million undocumented immigrants. It would allow virtually all undocumented immigrants to eventually apply for citizenship; increase legal immigration; add measures to secure ports of entry and speed processing of asylum seekers; and invest $4 billion in the economies of Central American countries to reduce migration.”

Neither bill came up for a vote even though Democrats enjoyed a majority in both houses of Congress.

Biden is right that Republicans opposed the bill. The New York Times noted that many Republicans said the bill didn’t invest enough in border security and would only encourage illegal immigration.

“This blatantly partisan proposal rewards those who broke the law, floods the labor market at a time when millions of Americans are out of work, fails to secure the border, and incentivizes further illegal immigration,” said Rep. Jim Jordan, who was the senior Republican on the House Judiciary Committee at the time.

A month after the bill was proposed, the New York Times reported on March 15 that not only Republicans were opposing the comprehensive legislation, but also “progressives and moderates” were at odds over the bill.

According to the New York Times, “Moderate Democrats have been hesitant to take difficult votes on a bill they know will be pilloried by Republicans and are pushing for a change in approach to more closely resemble past efforts that traded legalization of undocumented workers for tighter security at the border.”

As an example, the story quoted centrist Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas saying he would like “something a little more moderate, especially when it comes to border security.”

“Speaker Pelosi has discovered that she doesn’t have support for the comprehensive bill in the House, and I think that indicates where it is in the Senate as well,” said Sen. Richard J. Durbin, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.

A year later, in April 2022, the nonprofit news site Documented reported that the U.S. Citizenship Act “was ultimately abandoned by lawmakers in favor of smaller separate bills, given the unlikelihood that such sweeping reforms would gain enough support from Republicans and conservative Democrats to pass the Senate.” But even some of the smaller measures “stalled in Congress while others have perished as part of the broader Build Back Better bill,” the report stated.

Abbott Blames Biden

Shortly after Biden arrived in El Paso on Jan. 8, Abbott greeted the president with a handshake and a letter attacking his immigration policy.

“Your visit to our southern border with Mexico today is $20 billion too little and two years too late,” the letter began. “Moreover, your visit avoids the sites where mass illegal immigration occurs and sidesteps the thousands of angry Texas property owners whose lives have been destroyed by your border policies.”

Abbott accused Biden of failing to enforce immigration laws enacted by Congress, and called for a return to the policies under Trump.

“Under President Trump, the federal government achieved historically low levels of illegal immigration,” Abbott wrote. “Under your watch, by contrast, America is suffering the worst illegal immigration in the history of our country.”

It’s true that apprehensions of people attempting to cross illegally into the U.S. along the southern border shot up after Biden became president.

But it’s misleading to say the number of apprehensions was “historically low” under Trump. As we wrote in “Trump’s Final Numbers”: “Illegal border crossings, as measured by apprehensions at the southwest border, were 14.7% higher in Trump’s final year in office compared with the last full year before he was sworn in.”

The number of apprehensions plummeted in the immediate months after Trump took office in January 2017 — what an analyst at the Migration Policy Institute referred to as “the Trump Effect” — after constant talk on the campaign trail about building a wall and cracking down on illegal immigration. The monthly low of 11,127 apprehensions in April 2017 is unmatched in Customs and Border Protection monthly records going back to 2000. For the entire fiscal year, the number of apprehensions totaled 310,531, according to CBP data dating to fiscal year 1925. That’s the lowest fiscal year total since 1971. But it’s not a record.

The apprehension numbers from fiscal years 1925 through 1946 were in the tens of thousands before spiking in the late 1940s and into the mid-1950s, and then dropping below 100,000 again from 1956 to 1967.

So the total in Trump’s first year was low compared with numbers in the last several decades, but not a historical record.

But more importantly, the number of apprehensions started to creep back up in late 2017. The number of apprehensions during the Trump years peaked in calendar year 2019, when nearly 800,000 people were caught trying to enter the U.S. illegally at the southern border. That was higher than any year going back to 2007, and was higher than any year during President Barack Obama’s tenure, based on our review of monthly CBP data. In 2020, aided in part by the pandemic, numbers fell from the 2019 totals, but they were still higher than all but one of Obama’s eight years in office.

And again, in Trump’s final year in office, illegal border crossings, as measured by apprehensions at the southwest border, were higher than the last full year before he was sworn in.

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Summary

Here we go again. Donald Trump’s official bid to get back to the White House had us at FactCheck.org feeling a bit of déjà vu. His Nov. 15 speech announcing his candidacy for 2024 featured assertions we’ve fact-checked before and several mainstays of his rallies leading up to the midterm elections.

• Claiming a double-standard with regard to the search of Mar-a-Lago, Trump wrongly said former President Barack Obama “took a lot of things with him” when he left office. The National Archives and Records Administration says it always controlled and managed Obama administration records after his tenure.

• Trump claimed that “Joe Biden has intentionally surrendered our energy independence,” but the U.S. was never 100% self-sufficient or not reliant on energy imports under Trump.

• Comparing gasoline prices during his administration to Biden’s, Trump cherry-picked the pandemic low during his administration and greatly exaggerated current prices. And in any case, experts say neither president was primarily responsible for the prices.

• Trump also falsely claimed to have “filled up” the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which he said Biden has “virtually drained.” Neither is true.

• The former president wrongly said the southwest border was the “strongest ever” during his term and now is “open.” Apprehensions, a proxy for illegal immigration, were higher during Trump’s term than either of Obama’s terms. While they’ve increased considerably under President Joe Biden, well over 1 million, at least, have been expelled.

• Trump came up short of building the border wall he promised, despite his claim that he “completed” it.

• Trump downplayed the risk of climate change, incorrectly stating that sea level rise will be just “one-eighth of an inch over the next 200 to 300 years.” For U.S. coastlines, scientists project an increase of 10 to 12 inches in the next 30 years alone.

• He claimed that “drugs were coming into our country at the lowest level in many, many years” during his presidency. But the best available federal data suggest that overall drug smuggling may have been higher under Trump than Biden.

• He repeated his false talking point that his administration “built the greatest economy in the history of the world.” Annual real gross domestic product has exceeded Trump’s peak year 16 times.

• He claimed the U.S. “surrendered $85 billion” of military equipment when it withdrew troops from Afghanistan, a withdrawal that was initiated by his administration. That gross exaggeration is nearly the total amount spent on the Afghanistan Security Forces Fund since the war began in 2001.

• While talking about tariffs, Trump falsely claimed that “no president had ever sought or received $1 for our country from China until I came along.” Prior to his administration, the U.S. collected billions of dollars in tariffs on products imported from China.

• Trump falsely claimed the Department of Justice is going after parents “who object” at school board meetings to “indoctrinating our children.” U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said “spirited debate” is constitutionally protected but not “threats of violence or efforts to intimidate individuals based on their views.”

Analysis

Mar-a-Lago Search

Referencing the court-approved Aug. 8 search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in which FBI agents took possession of numerous records labeled “classified” and “Top Secret,” Trump said federal authorities were out to “get Trump” in ways they never were with his predecessors.

“And I said, ‘Why didn’t you raid Bush’s place?’” Trump said. “Why didn’t you raid Clinton’s place? Why didn’t you do Obama, who took a lot of things with him.”

We’re not sure to which Bush Trump was referring, George H.W. Bush or his son George W. Bush, but as we’ve written, neither of them stored presidential documents in their private residences after they left office. Neither did former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

Trump has made similar claims before, and all of the examples he has cited were cases of the National Archives and Records Administration — not the former presidents themselves — storing documents in secure facilities while permanent presidential libraries were being built.

With regard to Obama, specifically, NARA released a statement on Sept. 23, contradicting Trump’s repeated misstatements. NARA said it always controlled and managed the records from the Obama administration.

Energy Independence

The U.S. never stopped importing oil and other forms of energy from other countries when Trump was president. But he frequently claims that the U.S. became “energy independent” during his administration, which may give some people the false impression that the U.S. was 100% self-sufficient.

In his announcement speech, Trump claimed that “Joe Biden has intentionally surrendered our energy independence.”

Similarly, at his Florida rally, Trump said: “We are no longer energy independent or energy dominant, as we were just two short years ago. We are a nation that is begging Venezuela, Saudi Arabia and many other countries for oil.”

In 2019, during Trump’s presidency, the U.S. began producing more energy than it consumed for the first time since 1957, according to the Energy Information Administration. The EIA also said the U.S. became a net total energy exporter in 2019 for the first time since 1952.

Then, in 2020, the U.S. became a total petroleum net exporter for the first time since 1949, the EIA said. Petroleum includes crude oil and refined products from crude oil, such as gasoline and other fuels.

None of those achievements means that the U.S. did not rely on foreign sources of energy. To some energy analysts, a scenario in which the U.S. consumes only the energy that it produces is not likely to happen anytime soon.

As Andrew Campbell, executive director of the Energy Institute at Haas, told Reuters Fact Check: “If a country produces all of the energy that it consumes, does not participate in international trade in energy, does not import energy-intensive products, and does not send energy-related pollution to its neighbors or the atmosphere, then I would consider it energy independent. I don’t think any country meets that definition.”

Even if “energy independence” was determined by being a net exporter or having more production than consumption, the country’s status has not changed under Biden. The U.S. had more exports than imports of total primary energy and petroleum in 2021, and is on pace to do the same in 2022. Also, since Biden took office, U.S. energy production has continued to exceed its energy consumption.

On the other hand, the U.S. has consistently been a net importer of crude oil since the 1940s. But, so far, total crude oil imports, as well as net imports of crude oil, have been lower under Biden than they were under Trump — except in 2020, when imports dropped significantly due to reduced demand at the start of the pandemic.

Gasoline Prices

Contrasting his administration with Biden’s, Trump often cites gasoline prices, which spiked to just over $5 per gallon in mid-June. During his announcement speech, Trump cherry-picked and exaggerated both sides of that comparison, and regardless, experts say neither president’s policies are primarily responsible for the gasoline prices during their tenures.

“We were $1.87 a gallon for gasoline,” Trump said, “and now it’s hitting 5, 6, 7 and even $8 and it’s going to go really bad.”

Gasoline prices did dip to $1.87 in May 2020 when Trump was president, but that was during the pandemic when gasoline usage plummeted. Prices were the lowest in Trump’s presidency that month and the month before. Prices rose to $2.33 per gallon in January 2021, when Trump left office. That’s almost exactly the price of gasoline when Trump took office in January 2017, $2.35.

Trump is also exaggerating the price of gas now. Since the $5 per gallon high in June, the average price has dropped fairly steadily, and was at $3.80 the first week of November. (Trump claimed gas prices had reached their “highest levels in history,” but while the $5 per gallon peak is the highest in raw dollars, the price has been higher in inflation-adjusted dollars.)

In recent speeches, Trump has tied the $8 price to “parts of California.” But even that’s exaggerated. While it’s possible there were some gas stations in California where gas was selling for $8 a gallon when Trump made his statements, the average price of gas in the state — which is typically higher than any other state — was $5.46, according to AAA. And no county in California had an average price anywhere near $8 per gallon. So it is a classic case of cherry-picking. (We should note that Biden cherry-picks as well, like in September when he noted that regular gasoline in “some states” was under $3 per gallon, even though the national average that week was $3.71.)

More importantly, as we have written several times this year, U.S. presidents have little control over the price that consumers pay for gasoline.

The price of crude oil, which is refined into gasoline, is set on a global market. The low price of gasoline that Trump cited was the result of economic activity declining sharply in the U.S. and other countries early in the COVID-19 pandemic. It led to a decline in global demand for crude oil, which in turn led to a drop in the price of gasoline. It also resulted in oil companies spending and investing less. Then, as the global economy began to recover, and people began to resume their regular activities, including travel, global demand for crude oil increased rapidly while the global supply was not able to keep pace — and so gasoline prices rose.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in late February also has contributed to higher gasoline prices, experts told us. In response to the attack, the U.S. and other nations put sanctions and bans on oil from Russia, one of the world’s largest oil exporters.While Republicans have blamed U.S. oil production, and Biden’s cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline, experts told us those are not the reason for higher gasoline prices this year. U.S. oil production under Biden has increased a bit over 2020 production, and in its Short-Term Energy Outlook for October, the Energy Information Administration projected that crude oil production would average 11.7 million barrels per day in 2022, which would be more than every year but 2019.

During his announcement, Trump also falsely claimed to have “filled up” the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which he said Biden has “virtually drained in order to keep gasoline prices lower just prior to the election.”

When Trump left office, the nation’s emergency reserve held about 8% less crude oil than when Trump became president. Trump’s proposal to refill the reserve in March 2020 was blocked by Democrats.

Since October 2021, Biden has authorized the release of more than 200 million barrels of SPR oil in an attempt to increase the global supply of crude oil and bring down gasoline prices. Experts told us it’s hard to say how much the oil releases helped reduce prices.

As of Nov. 4, the SPR held roughly 396.2 million barrels of crude oil, which is about 55% of its authorized storage capacity. SPR oil stocks have decreased about 38% under Biden.

Illegal Immigration

The number of apprehensions of those trying to cross the U.S. southwest border has increased dramatically under Biden, but, again, Trump has made false and exaggerated claims in trying to draw a contrast between his term and now.

Echoing a claim he has made before, Trump falsely said the southwest border “was by far the strongest ever” during his administration. He also made the claim during midterm election rallies, such as a Nov. 7 event in Ohio in which he said the border was “the best ever,” adding, “There was nothing even close.”

Politicians and researchers use the number of apprehensions at the border as a measure of what’s happening with illegal immigration, and by that measure, the border wasn’t the “strongest” under Trump. In fact, the number of apprehensions was higher during Trump’s term than either of Obama’s four-year terms.

As we’ve written before, the number of apprehensions fluctuated wildly under Trump, dropping in 2017 but then rising the next two years. While apprehensions decreased in early 2020 with the COVID-19 pandemic, they picked up again the last half of that year and ended up being 14.7% higher in Trump’s final year in office compared with the last full year before he was sworn in.

Trump then claimed that under Biden, “our southern border has been erased and our country is being invaded by millions and millions of unknown people.” As he has said in his rallies, he also claimed the border was “open.” It’s not.

For one, the data we have on illegal immigration are figures on people U.S. Customs and Border Protection apprehend. Also, of the 2.2 million apprehended in fiscal year 2022, which ended Sept. 30, nearly half — 1 million — were expelled under Title 42, a public health law invoked during the pandemic that allows border officials to immediately return Mexican migrants caught trying to enter the country illegally. Biden has tried to end Title 42 , but a federal judge blocked the administration from terminating it.

Recidivism rates have also soared under Title 42, as more than a quarter of people caught at the border were already apprehended at least once before and returned to Mexico in fiscal years 2020 and 2021, according to Customs and Border Protection statistics.

“Millions” have been apprehended under Biden. In the most recent 12 months on record, apprehensions totaled 2,251,596, a 343% increase compared with Trump’s last year in office.

At one point in his announcement, Trump made the unfounded claim that “I believe it’s 10 million people coming in” through illegal immigration at the southern border. Ariel G. Ruiz Soto, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, told us the figure is “inaccurate and impossible,” based on the institute’s analysis of official CBP data.

“These data suggest that the true number of unauthorized migrants entering (even if temporarily) the United States is a fraction of the claimed 10 million figure,” Ruiz Soto said.

Not counting those expelled under Title 42, there have been 2.1 million apprehensions since January 2021 under what’s called Title 8, he said. These are apprehension events, so the number of unique people would be lower. But of the 2.1 million, “a significant number were allowed into the country to pursue asylum claims in immigration court or because they could not be deported to countries with limited U.S. relations (e.g., Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba). But others, primarily from Mexico and Central America, were quickly removed through a process called expedited removal or had prior removal orders reactivated,” Ruiz Soto said.

In addition, the Department of Homeland Security estimates in fiscal year 2021, which would include nearly four months of Trump’s tenure, there were 389,000 so-called “gotaways,” which are migrants U.S. Border Patrol detected but could not apprehend. Ruiz Soto said DHS hasn’t released estimates for fiscal year 2022, but “some unconfirmed news reports suggest there were 599,000 ‘gotaways’ in FY 2022 and up to 64,000 in October 2022.”

So, even if we add together “all these estimated ‘gotaways’ and unrealistically assuming that all of the 2.1 million migrant apprehensions under Title 8 were allowed into the country, the number would be a maximum of 3.2 million migrant entries since January 2021—which is well short of the claimed 10 million entries,” Ruiz Soto said.

Trump’s Wall Not Finished

Trump came up short of building the border wall he promised on the campaign trail in 2016, or what his administration initially proposed. But he has continued to falsely claim otherwise.

“We built the wall. We completed the wall and then we said, ‘Let’s do more,’ and we did a lot more,” Trump said in his announcement. “And as we were doing it we had an election that came up, and when they came in, they had three more weeks to complete the additions to the wall, which would have been great and they said no, no, we’re not going to do that.”

Similarly, he told the crowds at rallies in Pennsylvania and Florida that “we completely finished our original border wall plan.”

That’s wrong. As we’ve reported, when he was a candidate, Trump repeatedly talked about wanting 1,000 miles of a border wall. Once in office, he started moving the goal posts. The administration never released a master plan for the project. In early 2018, CNN obtained Customs and Border Protection documents asking for $18 billion over 10 years to build 722 miles of border wall, including “about 316 new miles of primary structure and about 407 miles of replacement and secondary wall.”

In the end, 458 miles of “border wall system” was built during Trump’s term, according to a CBP status report on Jan. 22, 2021. There were 52 miles of new primary wall and 33 miles of secondary wall where no barriers had been before. The rest, 373 miles, was replacement barriers for primary or secondary fencing that was dilapidated or outdated.

That’s a lot of construction. But the new fencing covers about 20% of the 1,954-mile land border. Including the fencing that existed before Trump took office, there are now about 706 miles of barriers.

False Climate Change Claim

Trump downplayed the threat of climate change when he attempted to argue that people, presumably Democrats, were ignoring the risk of nuclear weapons to focus solely on climate change.

“The Green New Deal and the environment, which they say may affect us in 300 years … is all that is talked about, yet nuclear weapons which would destroy the world immediately are never even discussed as a major threat,” he said. “They say the ocean will rise one-eighth of an inch over the next 200 to 300 years.”

Projections for future sea level rise are well above that figure, which Trump has previously used. Rather than increasing one-eighth of an inch over centuries, global sea level is already rising that much per year, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“Roads, bridges, subways, water supplies, oil and gas wells, power plants, sewage treatment plants, landfills—virtually all human infrastructure—is at risk from sea level rise,” NOAA says on its website.

That’s the global average, the agency says, so sea level rise may be higher or lower in specific places — and for much of the U.S., it’s projected to be worse.

In the next 30 years alone, sea level along the U.S. coast is projected to rise 10 to 12 inches, according to the U.S. government’s 2022 Sea Level Rise Technical Report.

“Sea level rise will create a profound shift in coastal flooding over the next 30 years by causing tide and storm surge heights to increase and reach further inland,” a website for the report explains. “By 2050, ‘moderate’ (typically damaging) flooding is expected to occur, on average, more than 10 times as often as it does today, and can be intensified by local factors.”

By 2100, scientists project between nearly 2 feet to more than 7 feet of sea level rise and between 2.6 feet and 12.8 feet by 2150 in the U.S. relative to the level in 2000.

“Failing to curb future emissions could cause an additional 1.5 – 5 feet (0.5 – 1.5 meters) of rise for a total of 3.5 – 7 feet (1.1 – 2.1 meters) by the end of this century,” the website notes.

Trump is also wrong to suggest that the environment or Americans have yet to be affected by climate change. Not only has the sea level already risen, but temperatures are higher and weather patterns have changed, which has impacted human health as well as plants and animals.

Drugs

In his speech from Mar-a-Lago, Trump claimed that “because the border was so tight” during his administration, “drugs were coming into our country at the lowest level in many, many years.” He later said that, under Biden, “hundreds of thousands of pounds of deadly drugs, including very lethal fentanyl, are flooding across the now open and totally porous southern border.”

He made a similar claim in Ohio, saying: “The drugs were down the lowest they were in 32 years. And now the drugs are seven times to 10 times higher than when we had it only two years ago. Think of it, the drugs are pouring in.”

We don’t know the source of Trump’s statistics, as comprehensive data on the total quantity of illicit drugs smuggled into the U.S. do not exist. The best data available is for the amount of drugs seized by federal border officials — most of which comes through legal ports of entry, not via illegal immigration between those ports.

Some use the drug-seizures data as a proxy for how much enters the country undetected. But if that’s what Trump is doing, the figures don’t back up his claims. If more seizures indicates that more drugs — not less — are getting into the U.S., then there was a bigger drug problem under Trump.

The most recent data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection show that federal authorities interdicted nearly 656,000 pounds of drugs in fiscal year 2022 and more than 913,000 pounds in fiscal 2021, which included three and a half months when Trump was president. Both figures are lower than the 1.06 million pounds seized in fiscal 2020, Trump’s last full fiscal cycle as president. Prior to the pandemic, 901,000 pounds of drugs were seized by border officials in fiscal 2019.

However, seizures of certain drugs, such as fentanyl, have increased under Biden.

Dozens of ads in the midterm elections mentioned fentanyl, which is a synthetic opioid many times stronger than morphine and heroin. Illicit fentanyl can be fatal in very small doses and has contributed to an increasing number of overdose deaths in the U.S. – sometimes when people unknowingly consume illegally manufactured drugs that contain fentanyl.

Federal border officials seized approximately 14,700 pounds of fentanyl in fiscal 2022. That was up more than 206% from the almost 4,800 pounds seized in fiscal 2020, which was about 71% more than the amount confiscated in fiscal 2019.

Afghanistan

Trump, whose administration negotiated an agreement with the Taliban to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan by May 1, 2021, criticized Biden for the chaotic withdrawal.

“The United States has been embarrassed, humiliated and weakened for all to see,” Trump said. “The disasters in Afghanistan — perhaps the most embarrassing moment in the history of our country — where we lost lives, left Americans behind and surrendered $85 billion worth of the finest military equipment anywhere in the world.”

The former president is right that the withdrawal from Afghanistan was chaotic, and it cost the lives of 13 U.S. service members who were ambushed outside the Kabul airport. He is also right, as we have written, that some U.S. citizens were left behind when the last U.S. soldier left the country.

But Trump grossly exaggerates when he claims the U.S. left $85 billion worth of military equipment in Afghanistan, and ignores his administration’s role in contributing to what he called the disaster in Afghanistan. On other occasions, Trump has said Biden “surrendered in Afghanistan,” which he said in Florida on Nov. 6 at one of his MAGA rallies in the final days of the midterm elections.

“We are a nation that surrendered in Afghanistan, leaving behind dead soldiers, American citizens and $85 billion worth of the finest military equipment in the world,” Trump said at the Florida rally.

The Trump administration in February 2020 negotiated a withdrawal agreement with the Taliban that excluded the Afghan government, freed 5,000 imprisoned Taliban soldiers and set a date of May 1, 2021, for the final withdrawal. The Trump administration kept to the pact, even though the Taliban did not, and reduced U.S. troop levels from about 13,000 to 2,500, against the advice of U.S. military leaders, before he left office.

During House testimony on Sept. 29, 2021, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Gen. Mark Milley said that based on his advice and “the advice of the commanders at the time,” then-Secretary of Defense Mark Esper submitted a memorandum to the White House on Nov. 9, 2020, “recommending that we maintain the US forces, which were then at about 4,500 in Afghanistan, until conditions were met for further reductions.”

The Taliban repeatedly failed to meet conditions required in the withdrawal agreement. It continued to attack Afghan government forces and welcomed al-Qaeda terrorists into the Taliban leadership, even as Trump continued to press for troop reductions.

“In the fall of 2020 my analysis was that an accelerated withdrawal without meeting specific and necessary conditions risks losing the substantial gains made in Afghanistan, damaging U.S. worldwide credibility, and could precipitate a general collapse of the ANSF [Afghan National Security Forces] and the Afghan government resulting in a complete Taliban takeover or general civil war,” Milley said in Senate testimony on Sept. 28, 2021. “That was a year ago. My assessment remained consistent throughout.”

Nonetheless, the Trump administration reduced troop levels to 2,500 by Jan. 15, 2021.

Biden delayed the May 1, 2021, withdrawal date that he inherited from Trump. But his administration pushed ahead with a plan to withdraw by Aug. 31, 2021 — also against the advice of U.S. military leaders.

Ultimately, the Taliban took advantage of a weakened United States and took control of the country sooner than Biden’s Aug. 31, 2021, withdrawal date. Taliban fighters entered the Afghan capital Kabul on Aug. 15, 2021, as the Afghan president fled the country and the U.S. evacuated diplomats. (For more, see our article “Timeline of U.S. Withdrawal from Afghanistan.”)

So both administrations bear responsibility for what Trump called the disaster in Afghanistan.

As for the U.S. military equipment left behind, Trump’s $85 billion figure — actually $82.9 billion — was the total amount spent on the Afghanistan Security Forces Fund since the war began in 2001. But it wasn’t all for military equipment, and most of the U.S. equipment purchased in those two decades had become inoperable, or had been moved out of the country or “decommisioned” or destroyed.

As we wrote, the biggest chunk of the Afghanistan Security Forces Fund, about half, was for what is called “sustainment,” and most of that went for Afghan army and national police salaries.

CNN reported in April that a Department of Defense report said $7.12 billion of military equipment the U.S. had given to the Afghan government was in Afghanistan after the U.S. withdrawal.

“Nearly all equipment used by U.S. military forces in Afghanistan was either retrograded or destroyed prior to our withdrawal and is not part of the ‘$7.12 billion’ figure cited in the report,” a spokesperson for the Defense Department, Army Maj. Rob Lodewick, said, according to CNN.

Not ‘Greatest Economy’ in History

As he did many times when he was in office, Trump repeated the false talking point that his administration “built the greatest economy in the history of the world.”

He cited the stock market at one point in his speech, but economists generally measure a nation’s health by the growth of its inflation-adjusted gross domestic product. And dating back to Ronald Reagan’s presidency, the real GDP exceeded Trump’s peak year of 2.9% 16 times. The GDP also hit 5.9% under Biden in 2021.

China Tariffs

Trump repeated his false claim that no president before him had collected tariffs on Chinese products exported to the U.S.

“China was paying billions and billions of dollars in taxes and tariffs,” Trump said in his Nov. 15 remarks. “No president had ever sought or received $1 for our country from China until I came along.”

As we’ve written before, prior to Trump becoming president, the U.S. collected $122.6 billion in customs duties on Chinese goods from 2007 to 2016, or $12.3 billion a year on average, according to data available though the U.S. International Trade Commission DataWeb.

Furthermore, the tariffs collected are not paid by China, as we’ve also noted before. The tariffs are paid by U.S. importers in the form of customs duties, and to some extent by U.S. consumers in the form of higher prices.

Department of Justice Not Going After Parents Who ‘Object’

Trump revived a false Republican talking point about the Department of Justice going after parents “who object” at school board meetings.

“Joe Biden has also proven that he is committed to indoctrinating our children, even using the Department of Justice against parents who object,” Trump said in his announcement speech.

This is a version of the false claim made by several Republicans that U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland labelled parents who complain at school board meetings “domestic terrorists” and that he instructed the Department of Justice to target such parents.

As we wrote back in April, the Justice Department did not label parents “domestic terrorists.” Rather, a Sept. 29, 2021, letter sent by the National School Boards Association to the White House argued that some violent threats against school officials “could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism.” The association asked for federal assistance to stop what it said was a growing number of threats and acts of violence against public school board members and other public school district officials — mainly over the issues of mask mandates and “propaganda purporting the false inclusion of critical race theory within classroom instruction and curricula.” (Critical race theory is the study of institutional racism as a means to better understand and address racial inequality. It has become a hot-button political issue among Republicans who oppose it being taught in public schools.)

Garland did not use NSBA’s “terrorism” language, for which the group later apologized. Although Garland directed his agency to review strategies to address violent threats and harassment against school boards, the policy was never targeted at parents who simply “object,” as Trump put it.

In fact, Garland issued a memo on Oct. 4, 2021, stating that “spirited debate about policy matters is protected under our Constitution.” He added, however, that “that protection does not extend to threats of violence or efforts to intimidate individuals based on their views.”

“I want to be clear, the Justice Department supports and defends the First Amendment right of parents to complain as vociferously as they wish about the education of their children, about the curriculum taught in the schools,” Garland said two weeks later at a House Judiciary Committee hearing.

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Like many Democrats, Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes says he wants to cut “middle-class” taxes and make sure the wealthy “pay their fair share.” But an ad from his opponent, Sen. Ron Johnson, in the race for U.S. Senate falsely tells the state’s voters that Barnes wants to “double your income taxes.”

The Johnson campaign told us the reference was to remarks Barnes made in 2019 when he said: “We need to make sure that everyone — especially the powerful and privileged — pay their fair share in taxes. As we all know, the top federal tax rate on the wealthiest was 70% just a few decades ago.” But Barnes did not explicitly advocate reinstating such a rate. And even if he had, raising the top marginal rate — which now is 37% for individual taxable income above $539,900 — wouldn’t amount to doubling “your income taxes” for the vast majority of the public.

A spokesperson for the Barnes campaign told us he cited the past high top rate “to make his point that marginal tax increases on the wealthy would not crash the economy. He was not supporting and does not support a 70% top income tax rate.”

The TV ad uses video from one of Barnes’ ads showing the Democratic nominee hitting baseballs in a park. Johnson’s voiceover calls that TV spot “cutesy” and then rattles off a laundry list of what he calls Barnes’ “too extreme” positions, misleadingly describing most of them. The ad began airing Sept. 6.

Johnson, a Republican, has held the Wisconsin Senate seat since 2011. The Cook Political Report says the race is a toss-up.

Barnes on Taxes

Barnes’ website is short on specifics, but clearly says he wants to lower taxes for what he calls the “middle class” and raise taxes on the “wealthiest.”

In a video stating his priorities for taxes, Barnes says: “I’ll cut middle-class taxes, and I’ll pay for it by ensuring the wealthiest among us pay their fair share. I’ll cut taxes on families and expand the child tax credit to give parents some breathing room.”

That sounds like the opposite of wanting to “double your income taxes.” When we asked the Johnson campaign about the claim, it pointed to Barnes’ response for the Working Families Party to the president’s State of the Union address in 2019. But the claim is relying on a distortion of Barnes’ remarks.

The Working Families Party, which supports Barnes’ candidacy, is a self-described “multiracial party that fights for workers over bosses and people over the powerful.”

In his 2019 speech, Barnes listed several policy goals on various topics, ending with this one: “We need to make sure that everyone — especially the powerful and privileged — pay their fair share in taxes. As we all know, the top federal tax rate on the wealthiest was 70% just a few decades ago.”

The Johnson campaign points out that he followed that statement with this: “And if the success of 2018 gave us reason to hope that this path is possible, the next two years will give us an opportunity to realize that hope.” But it’s not clear that Barnes was saying a 70% top tax rate is possible — as opposed to saying that making the wealthy pay a “fair share,” whatever that might mean, is doable, along with meeting all the other Democratic goals he had outlined in that speech.

As we said, the Barnes campaign said he was not — and is not — advocating a 70% top marginal rate.

Barnes’ reference in 2019 came at a time when other Democrats were drawing attention to the fact that the top marginal rate used to be that high, or higher. From 1936 to 1980, it was 70% or more — as high as 94% in the mid-1940s, as this chart from the Tax Policy Center shows.

There were a lot more tax brackets back in those days. In 1980, the top 70% rate applied to individual taxable income above $108,300, which would be about $400,000 in today’s dollars. The Tax Foundation has said those high rates led to more business income being taxed in the corporate tax system, and after 1980, much of that business income came back into the individual tax system.

As for Barnes’ tax plan, his spokesperson said he opposes the Republican 2017 tax law, enacted under then-President Donald Trump, and in particular wants to change a tax cut Johnson pushed for in that law giving a break to most business owners, who pay individual income tax on their business earnings. (Several reports have found that while the tax cut broadly benefited these so-called pass-through businesses, the bulk of the tax savings, predictably, flowed to those earning the most money, as our fact-checking colleagues at PolitiFact.com have explained.)

Barnes supports a minimum income tax on people whose wealth is worth more than $100 million. Under such a plan — proposed by President Joe Biden earlier this year — about 700 billionaires, according to the White House’s estimate, would pay at least 20% in taxes on income and capital gains, even on unsold assets. Barnes also has said he wants to expand the child tax credit and earned income tax credit.

Other Claims

Johnson’s TV ad includes several other claims about Barnes’ supposed positions, but frames most of them in misleading ways or leaves out context.

Police funding. The ad says Barnes “supports the defund police movement.” Barnes calls that a “lie” in a TV ad of his own.

Interestingly, both campaigns cited the same Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article as one piece of evidence to support their arguments. The Johnson camp highlights a line about five groups who support defunding the police endorsing Barnes, while the Barnes camp points to Barnes’ “definitive” statement that he doesn’t support defunding the police.

The Journal Sentinel article said that “Barnes is now distancing himself from two unpopular, far-left political movements — defunding police and abolishing ICE — despite support from groups backing these efforts and past social media activity referencing these causes.”

The ad doesn’t explain what it means by “defund police.” As we’ve said before, there’s no one definition. Some critics advocate completely defunding police and replacing police departments with new community safety organizations, while others talk about reallocating some funding to social service agencies, such as those equipped to deal with mental health problems.

Barnes has talked about reallocation. In a June 2020 interview with PBS Wisconsin — less than two months after George Floyd, a Black man, was killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis, sparking protests against police brutality across the country — Barnes spoke repeatedly about shifting some resources from police departments to other city services and programs to prevent crime.

He was asked directly: “Do you agree that police budgets should be maybe completely done away with, or, or defunded?” Barnes responded: “Not completely done away with.”

He went on to say:

Barnes, June 2020 interview, PBS Wisconsin: We need to invest more in neighborhood services and programming for our residents, for our communities on the front end. Where will that money come from? Well, it can come from over-bloated budgets in police departments, you know? …

The more money we invest on the front end, because we spend over a billion dollars to put people in prison. The more money we invest in opportunity for people, the less money we have to spend on prisons. The same way the more money we invest in communities, the more opportunity we offer to residents in all parts of our state, the less money we’ll have to spend on police work.

And this isn’t about, look, this isn’t about, you know, beating up on police officers. This is about recognizing the moment that we’re in and recognizing the needs that exist. And it’s also about expecting a high quality of performance from the people who are sworn to protect and serve. And if we offer more opportunities for people in communities, that in turn makes their job that much easier.

And it’s also unrealistic to expect police officers to play the role of social worker, to play the role of mental health professional. In so many instances, they are called into those situations where their expertise does not offer them the opportunity to reasonably resolve that situation. And we see, we see things end up becoming much worse. So if we put more money into mental health services for people, for social services for people, to be able to respond to those instances, we will all be much better off and more safe.

In the interview Barnes also referred to “defunding” as a reallocation of some funding.

“And you know, defunding isn’t necessarily as aggressive as a lot of folks paint it. You know, school budgets get cut almost every year. The arts budgets get cut almost every year, you know, music programs, all these programs see budget cuts unfortunately. And it’s the result, that’s a part of the reason we are where we are because our youth don’t have the outlets that they once had to express themselves,” he said. “And you know, every other budget that gets cut, it seems like, ‘Oh, well, we just had to cut this budget. We had to do what we had to do. We had to tighten up our purse strings. We had to tighten up our belt.’ But the minute you talk about reducing a police department’s budget, then it’s like all hell breaks loose and everybody, everybody acts like you are, you’re signaling Armageddon. But that’s not the case. It’s about reallocating funds in a way that actually promotes safety.”

In his TV ad, Barnes says: “I’ll make sure our police have the resources and training they need to keep our communities safe. And that our communities have the resources to stop crime before it happens,” which echoes other statements he has made in the campaign.

His campaign also pointed out that under Democratic Gov. Tony Evers and Barnes, as lieutenant governor, law enforcement agencies and violence prevention efforts received tens of millions in federal COVID-19 relief funding made available to states to cover pandemic-related costs and recovery however they wished.

Viewers of the ad likely have different ideas about what “defund police” means, but Barnes’ current and past statements show he supports reallocating some funding for community or social service programs, not abolishing police departments.

Cash bail. Barnes supports eliminating cash bail, but doesn’t support releasing defendants in cases where there’s a threat of violence. But Johnson’s ad says without further explanation that Barnes “wrote a bill to release criminals without bail.”

In March 2016, Barnes, then a state representative, and other lawmakers introduced a bill to eliminate monetary bail as a condition for releasing someone charged with a crime before the trial or releasing someone convicted of a crime before sentencing. According to a summary of the bill by the state Legislative Reference Bureau, a court would be “required to release a defendant before trial unless it finds, by clear and convincing evidence, that there is a substantial risk that the defendant will not appear for trial or will cause serious bodily harm to a member of the community or intimidate a witness if he or she is released. Under the bill, the court may not use the nature, number, and gravity of the offenses as the sole sufficient reason for refusing to release the defendant.”

The bill didn’t pass. Barnes’ spokesperson told us the candidate still supports such a law, describing the issue as a matter of not allowing “violent criminals” to “be able to buy their way out of jail,” and adding that the bill he backed “mandated that if a judge deemed a defendant a violent threat to the community, the judge could not offer bail at all.”

Courts do not have to offer bail under the current state law. They can deny release to defendants accused of serious offenses, including first-degree homicide and sexual assault, and sexual assault of a child (see section 969.035). And the 2016 bill Barnes co-sponsored didn’t change that provision of the law. But a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article on the state’s bail policies said prosecutors often don’t pursue detention without bail because of the burden of proof required by the law. Instead, they favor setting bail at a high amount.

Other ads from outside groups, such as the Senate Leadership Fund super PAC, also have focused on crime, misleadingly claiming that Barnes supports “defunding the police” and “eliminating cash bail” including for violent criminals. One TV ad from the Senate Leadership Fund, which is being distributed through Facebook, says no-cash-bail would apply “even with shootings” and “violent attacks on our police.” But that ignores the fact that Barnes’ position is to keep in custody those at “substantial risk” of causing “serious bodily harm” to others.

Health insurance. Barnes supports Medicare for All. The Johnson ad misleadingly frames this as Barnes wanting to “eliminate your employer-provided health insurance,” not mentioning that Barnes supports universal health coverage.

Under Medicare for All, such as the plan introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders in 2019, private insurance, including work-based plans, would be eliminated, but everyone would still have insurance.

Barnes’ campaign told us he “supports building a path to Medicare for All,” but in the meantime supports the Affordable Care Act; expanding Medicaid in the 12 states, including Wisconsin, that haven’t adopted the expansion under the ACA; and allowing people to enroll in Medicare starting at age 50.

Another Johnson campaign ad claims that Medicare for All “would double your income taxes,” but that’s not exactly what the NBC News article cited on screen said.

The article is about a 2019 report from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget that said doubling income and corporate taxes would be one way to pay for Medicare for All, among others, and that the plan could lower costs for families. NBC News said the authors “suggested that Medicare for All could reduce average total costs for lower- and middle-income families by eliminating more medical expenses than they would pay in taxes and requiring higher earners to pay a larger share of their tab.”

In 2020, CRFB analyzed a plan by Sanders on the various ways he would pay for Medicare for All, which included a 4% income-tax “premium” that exempted the first $29,000 for families of four and a 7.5% employer payroll tax that would “ultimately” be paid by employees, CRFB said. Of course, under such a health system, people would no longer pay for health insurance premiums or deductibles, as the federal government pays for “virtually the full cost of health care,” the analysis said.

Immigration. In a 2017 tweet, Barnes equated Trump’s proposed border wall to “xenophobia” and expressed support for a state bill to bar the Wisconsin Investment Board from investing in federal contractors building the barriers. And in his 2019 response to the State of the Union, he said: “We need an immigration system that treats all people with dignity and with respect, a system that says that no human being is illegal.”

The Johnson campaign points to those two comments as support for its claim that Barnes wants “open borders.” But neither comment supports that claim. Barnes didn’t say anyone should be able to come into the U.S. without restrictions.

His campaign told us he “does not favor open borders” and that he supports “comprehensive immigration reform.” On his website, Barnes says the U.S. “immigration system is broken.” He continues: “We can protect our borders and help those who are coming to the U.S. in search of better lives,” calling for a “path to citizenship” for people who live in the country now.

Finally, the Johnson ad says Barnes “supports taxpayer-funded benefits for illegals.” The campaign says that’s a reference to his support for driver’s licenses and in-state college tuition for immigrants, which Barnes mentioned in that 2019 SOTU response.

Barnes and Gov. Evers have continued to support such a proposal.

Those living in the U.S. illegally are ineligible for most federal benefits, with a few exceptions, such as emergency medical care, non-cash emergency disaster relief and public health measures for communicable diseases.

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Summary

Since President Joe Biden took office:

• The economy regained nearly 9 million jobs, coming within about half a million of the pre-pandemic peak.
• Unemployment fell to 3.6%; unfilled job openings surged, with 1.9 slots for every person seeking work.
• Inflation roared back to the highest level in over 40 years. Consumer prices are up 12.6%. Gasoline alone nearly doubled.
• Wages rose briskly, by 7.7%. But after adjusting for inflation, “real” weekly earnings went down 5.3%.
• The economy contracted at an estimated annual rate of 1.6% during the first three months of this year, after rising 5.7% in 2021.
• Corporate profits reached another record high of $2.62 trillion last year, and they’re running a bit higher in 2022.
• Consumer confidence in the economy reached the lowest point on record.
• Apprehensions of those trying to enter the country illegally through the southwest border are up 336% for the past 12 months, compared with President Donald Trump’s last year in office.
• In President Joe Biden’s first full 17 months in office, the U.S. has admitted 25,108 refugees, still far below his goal of 125,000 a year.
• The federal deficit has declined, but the public debt has still increased by 10.4%.
• The U.S. trade deficit grew by over 49% and is on pace for a new annual high.
• The number of Americans without health insurance decreased slightly, by 1.6 million people from 2020 to 2021.
• Crude oil production and imports have increased — up 1.1% and 6.8%, respectively.
• Gun sales, as estimated by using background checks, have declined by more than 30%.
• The NASDAQ composite index is down, while the S&P 500 index and the Dow Jones Industrial Average have registered only small gains.
• The number of people receiving food benefits through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program is down 2.2%.

Analysis

This is our second quarterly update of “Biden’s Numbers,” the continuation of a regular feature we began in 2012 on statistical measures of the country’s economic and social well-being under the occupant of the White House.

As we’ve said many times, we don’t assign blame or credit to the president for these figures; opinions will differ on that. We also don’t yet have data on some topics for 2021, Biden’s first year in office. Later this year, we should have Census Bureau figures on poverty and household income, an FBI report on nationwide crime, and gun manufacturing data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Jobs and Unemployment

The number of people with jobs has increased dramatically since Biden took office, but total employment hasn’t quite returned to pre-pandemic levels.

Employment — The U.S. economy added 8,963,000 jobs between Biden’s inauguration and June, the latest month for which data is available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But there were still 524,000 fewer people working in June than there were in February 2020, the peak of total employment before COVID-19 forced mass shutdowns and layoffs.

When the June figures were released, Biden boasted that the private sector had recovered. “We have more Americans working today in the private sector … than any time in American history,” he said. And it’s true that private sector employment now exceeds the pre-pandemic peak by 140,000 jobs. But government employment is still 664,000 jobs short of recovery. Almost half that shortfall — 334,000 — is among public school teachers and other local education workers. 

Unemployment — The unemployment rate fell from 6.4% at the time Biden took office to 3.6% during March, April, May and June — a decline of 2.8 percentage points. Biden correctly noted that the current rate is “near a historic low.”

Since 1948, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics began keeping records, the jobless rate has been at or below 3.6% for only 69 months, or 7.7% of the time. Nine of those months were during the Trump years, when the rate hit a low of 3.5% in February 2020, just before the pandemic. That was the lowest since the 1960s. The lowest on record was 2.5% in May and June 1953.

Job Openings — The number of unfilled job openings soared to a record of nearly 11.9 million as of the last business day of March, the highest in the 21 years the BLS has tracked the measure.

The number had slipped down to just under 11.3 million on the last business day of May, the most recent month on record. But even that is an increase of just over 4 million openings, or nearly 56%, during Biden’s time.

So many openings, in fact, that in May there was an average of nearly 1.9 jobs for every job seeker.

(June data on openings will be released on Aug. 2.)

Labor Force Participation — One reason many job openings go unfilled is that millions of Americans left the workforce during the pandemic and haven’t returned. The labor force participation rate (the percentage of the total population over age 16 that is either employed or actively seeking work) has inched up slightly during Biden’s time, from 61.4% in January 2021 to 62.2% in June.

But that’s an increase of only 0.8 percentage points, and still well below the pre-pandemic rate of 63.4% for February 2020. And even that increase is likely temporary.

The rate peaked at 67.3% in the first four months of 2000, but has since been in decline. It went down under both Republican and Democratic presidents — by 1.5 percentage points under President George W. Bush, by another 2.9 points under Barack Obama and by a further 1.4 points under Donald Trump.

In its 10-year economic projection, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicted — both before and after Biden took office — that the rate will continue to decline over the next decade.

Manufacturing Jobs — During the presidential campaign, Biden promised he had a plan to create a million new manufacturing jobs — and whether it’s his doing or not, the number is rising briskly.

As of June, the U.S. added 613,000 manufacturing jobs during Biden’s time, a 5% increase in the space of 17 months, according to BLS. Furthermore, the June total is 12,000 above the number of manufacturing jobs in February 2020, before the pandemic forced plant closures and layoffs.

During Trump’s four years, the economy lost 182,000 manufacturing jobs, or 1.4%, largely due to the pandemic. The number recovered steadily during Trump’s last eight months, and has continued to rise under Biden.

Wages and Inflation

CPI — Inflation came roaring back under Biden — with prices rising faster than they have in over 40 years.

During his first 17 months in office, the Consumer Price Index rose 12.6%.

It’s the worst inflation in decades. The most recent 12 months on record, ending in June, saw a 9.1% increase in the CPI (before seasonal adjustment), which the Bureau of Labor Statistics said was the biggest such increase since the 12 months ending in November 1981.

Inflation had been relatively dormant for years before Biden. The CPI rose an average of only 1.9% each year of the Trump presidency (measured as the 12-month change ending each January), 1.8% during President Barack Obama’s eight years and 2.4% during George W. Bush’s two terms.

The current inflation is hitting especially hard where people experience it most regularly — at the gas pump and at the grocery store. In the most recent 12 months, gasoline prices increased 59.9% and food at home increased 12.2%, the BLS said.

Gasoline Prices — The psychological effect of inflation is magnified by that huge spike in gasoline prices, which are advertised in foot-high numbers on street corners everywhere.

The rise was shocking. The national average price of regular gasoline at the pump soared to a brief peak of just over $5 a gallon for the week ending June 13 — the highest weekly price ever recorded by the Energy Information Administration.

Since then the price has been drifting down, but was still $4.49 per gallon during the week ending July 18, the most recent week on record. That’s an increase of 88.7% since the week before Biden took office. The level is still well above the old pre-Biden record, which was $4.11 for two weeks in July 2008, during George W. Bush’s last year in office.

Biden blames “Putin’s price hike” for this pain at the pump, but the fact is gasoline prices already had gone up 48% under Biden as of the week before Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine. Prices actually began rising before Biden’s inauguration. Experts have told us the primary cause of higher gas prices is a global supply and demand issue brought about by the world’s economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, and Russia’s invasion.

Relief may come, gradually. “We forecast gasoline prices will average $4.05/gal in 2022 and $3.57/gal in 2023” the EIA said in its most recent Short-Term Energy Outlook this month. 

Wages — Wages also have gone up under Biden, but not as fast as prices.

Average weekly earnings for rank-and-file workers went up over 7.7% during Biden’s first 17 months in office, according to monthly figures compiled by the BLS. Those production and nonsupervisory workers make up 81% of all employees in the private sector.

But inflation ate up all that gain and more. What are called “real” earnings, adjusted for inflation and measured in dollars valued at their average level in 1982-84, actually declined 5.3% during that time.

And as of June, real earnings for rank-and-file workers have fallen to below where they were in February 2020, before the pandemic.

Economic Growth

Biden’s economic fortunes took a turn for the worse in the first quarter of 2022. 

The economy contracted at an estimated annual rate of 1.6% during the first three months of this year, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. That figure – the most recent estimate for first-quarter growth in the nation’s real gross domestic product – accounts for the high rate of inflation.

The economic contraction follows a 5.7% increase in Biden’s first year – a bounce-back year after the pandemic-battered economy shrank by 3.4% in 2020. 

Economists weren’t expecting last year’s level of growth to continue. But the decline in real GDP in the first quarter caught some by surprise. Now, many economists are warning of a recession.

According to a survey by the Financial Times and the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, nearly 70% of 49 economists surveyed believe there will be a recession next year. 

The first official estimate for the second quarter of 2022 won’t be released until July 28. However, the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s “GDP Now” estimated on July 19 that the economy will decline by 1.6% in the second quarter.

Corporate Profits

After-tax corporate profits reached a record high of $2.62 trillion last year — and they are running slightly higher so far this year. 

The 2021 profits were 37.3% higher than the full-year figure for 2020, as estimated by the BEA (see line 45). 

The BEA’s most recent estimate, covering the first three months of 2022, shows after-tax profits running at an annual rate of nearly $2.73 trillion — an increase of nearly 43% over the full-year 2020 figure.

Consumer Sentiment

After rising early in Biden’s presidency, consumer confidence in the economy reached the lowest point on record. 

Shortly after Biden assumed the presidency, the University of Michigan’s Surveys of Consumers reported that its monthly Index of Consumer Sentiment rose from 79 in January 2021 to 88.3 in April 2021, as COVID-19 vaccines became more available and economic conditions improved. 

But last April’s index was a high point for Biden, as rising inflation has eroded consumer confidence in the economy.

The monthly index was a record-low 50 in June — 29 points lower than it was when Biden took office. The preliminary results for July showed the Index of Consumer Sentiment was relatively unchanged at 51.1. (The final July index will be released July 29.)

“The share of consumers blaming inflation for eroding their living standards continued its rise to 49%, matching the all-time high reached during the Great Recession,” Surveys of Consumers Director Joanne Hsu said in a release announcing the preliminary results for July. “These negative views endured in the face of the recent moderation in gas prices at the pump.”

Home Prices & Homeownership

Home Prices — Home prices continue to climb under Biden.

The most recent figures from the National Association of Realtors show the median price of an existing, single-family home sold in June was $423,300 — up 37.4% from January 2021. 

The median existing-home price for all housing types — not just single-family houses — was a record-high $416,000, up 13.4% from a year ago ($366,900). “This marks 124 consecutive months of year-over-year increases, the longest-running streak on record,” NAR said in a July 20 press release.

Home prices in Biden’s first year set new records, because of low interest rates, a lack of adequate inventory and other factors. That trend has continued in the first half of this year, although the Federal Reserve’s interest rate hikes are expected to slow housing prices. 

The 30-year fixed-rate mortgage averaged 5.51% as of July 14, nearly double the rate a year ago, according to mortgage buyer Freddie Mac. 

“We will see house price growth to level off here, and we’ll see some price declines in some of the more juiced up markets across the country. And in my mind, that’s a correction when house prices start to go lower,” Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics, told CBS News.

Homeownership — With housing prices high and inventory low, the homeownership rate has barely budged under Biden.

The homeownership rate, which the Census Bureau measures as the percentage of occupied housing units that are owner-occupied, was 65.4% in the first quarter of 2022 — 0.2 percentage points lower than a year ago and 0.4 percentage points lower than the 65.8% rate during Trump’s last quarter in office. (Word of caution: The bureau warns against making comparisons with the fourth quarter of 2020, because of pandemic-related restrictions on in-person data collection.) 

The rate peaked under Trump in the second quarter of 2020 at 67.9%, before the economic effects of the pandemic drove down homeownership rates. 

The highest homeownership rate on record was 69.2% in 2004, when George W. Bush was president. 

Immigration

The number of apprehensions of people trying to enter the U.S. illegally at the southwest border continues to soar under Biden.

To even out the seasonal changes in border crossings, our measure compares the most recent 12 months on record with the year prior to a president taking office. And for the past 12 months ending in June, apprehensions totaled 2,216,791, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. That’s 336% higher than during Trump’s last year in office.

As we have noted in past roundups of Biden’s numbers, apprehensions were on the rise when Trump left office — and were 14.7% higher in Trump’s last year compared with the year before he took office. But the number of apprehensions has jumped dramatically since Biden became president.

And since our last quarterly Biden report, apprehensions have continued to rise steeply. In May, there were 224,220 apprehensions — representing a new high for the Biden administration and more than any single month going back to at least fiscal year 2000. 

Most of the recent increase in attempted illegal border crossings can be attributed to migrants coming from countries not among the traditional feeder countries of Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, Jessica Bolter, an associate policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, told us in a phone interview. For example, between February and May, Bolter said, there has been a 98% increase in apprehensions of migrants from Colombia, and a 54% increase in those from Cuba. (Over the same period, apprehensions of migrants from Mexico have risen 4%.) There have also been increases in migrants from Nicaragua, Venezuela and Brazil.

Cuba alone has accounted for 139,000 of the migrants attempting to illegally cross into the U.S. this fiscal year, Bolter said. Cuba has been experiencing the worst economic crisis since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, causing massive inflation, she said, and a political crackdown on dissidents has encouraged many to flee the country. And in November 2021, Nicaragua lifted the tourist visa requirement for Cubans. That made it more accessible for Cubans to fly to Nicaragua, and then to head to the U.S. via a land route.

Much of the migration from these countries is driven by the continued economic impact of the pandemic, Bolter said, which has led to high levels of unemployment and food insecurity throughout Latin America. And that is coupled with significant job opportunities in the U.S., which is experiencing a high demand for labor.

Another factor, Bolter said, is that immediate expulsion from Title 42 is significantly lower for people coming from these other countries. Title 42 is a public health law invoked at the southwest border in March 2020 that allowed border officials to immediately turn away many of those caught trying to enter the country illegally. Trump invoked the law because of the coronavirus pandemic.  

Mexico has for the most part refused to accept expelled migrants from countries other than Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, so U.S. immigration authorities can’t just turn around people who have come from other countries. That makes expulsion more resource-intensive for border officials, Bolter said, because they need to arrange flights and travel documents. With resources already stretched thin, she said, border officials simply don’t invoke Title 42 as readily for people from those countries.

So while the Title 42 expulsion rate in fiscal year 2022 is 88% for people coming from Mexico, 67% for people from Guatemala and 64% from Honduras, it is far lower for people from countries such as Cuba (2%), Colombia (4%), Nicaragua (3%) and Venezuela (0.4%). If migrants are not immediately expelled via Title 42, there is “a chance of staying, at least temporarily,” as their cases work through the immigration process, Bolter said, thereby encouraging some people from these countries to attempt migration to the U.S.

Also contributing to the increase in illegal immigration, she said, is that “the Biden administration is perceived as being more lenient toward migrants at the border than the Trump administration was,” which has encouraged more people to attempt to come to the U.S.

On April 1, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced it was terminating its Title 42 order, effective May 23. At the time, the Department of Homeland Security warned that lifting the order could trigger a “significant increase in migration and enforcement encounters.” But in mid-May, before the termination took effect, a federal judge blocked the lifting of the order, and it remains in place.

It’s hard to know, Bolter said, how much impact the Biden administration’s efforts to cease Title 42 had on the migrant surge. There was clearly a rush of Haitian migrants amassing on the Mexican side of the border in anticipation of the lifting of Title 42, she said. (Outside of traditional immigration feeder countries, Haiti has the highest Title 42 expulsion rate — 36% in fiscal year 2022.) When Title 42 was kept in place by a federal judge, many of those Haitian immigrants likely tried to cross into the U.S. anyway, Bolter said.

Refugees

Biden remains far from meeting his goal — first set as a candidate — of accepting 125,000 refugees into the United States each fiscal year.

As president, Biden set the cap at 125,000 for fiscal year 2022, which began Oct. 1, 2021, and ends Sept. 30, 2022. But to accomplish that goal, the U.S. would have to admit on average 10,417 refugees each month. So far, State Department data show that the U.S. in the first nine months of fiscal year 2022 has admitted a total of only 15,100 refugees, or less than 1,700 per month. (Select “Refugee Admissions Report” to view the data.)

In Biden’s first full 17 months in office, the U.S. has admitted 25,108 refugees, or 1,477 per month. That’s nearly 20% less than the 1,843 monthly average during Trump’s four years. (For both presidents, our monthly averages include only full months in office, excluding the month of January 2017 and January 2021, when administrations overlapped.)

In setting the goal at 125,000 for fiscal year 2022, the State Department said “the pandemic globally continues to affect the ability” of the administration “to process large numbers of refugees safely and will undoubtedly impact activity into FY 2022.” The department also said it needed to rebuild its staff after four years of cuts in staffing and resources by the Trump administration.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February has forced more than 5.9 million Ukrainians to flee the country for another European country, and more than 3.7 million to register for temporary residence in those countries, as of July 19, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. The Biden administration has said it will accept up to 100,000 Ukrainians into the United States by whatever legal means are available, “including the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, parole, and visas.”

From February, when the war began, through June, the U.S. has accepted 763 refugees from Ukraine. That’s nearly three times more than the U.S. accepted during the same five-month period a year ago.

The “normal refugee” process “takes a long time,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in an April 6 interview, so the Biden administration is looking at other “legal pathways” to assist Ukrainian refugees.

Debt and Deficits

Debt — As of July 18, the public debt, which does not include money the government owes itself, had increased to almost $23.89 trillion – up from $23.85 trillion on April 11, when we last checked.

Under Biden, the public debt so far has gone up 10.4%. It increased by 50% during Trump’s four years in office.

Deficits — On the other hand, federal borrowing declined during the first nine months of fiscal year 2022 when compared with the same period in fiscal year 2021, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates. 

In its monthly budget review for June, CBO said the deficit through the first nine months of the current fiscal year (from October 2021 to June 2022) was $514 billion, or roughly 23% of the $2.24 trillion deficit during the same nine-month period in fiscal year 2021. The cumulative deficit for the first three quarters of fiscal 2022 is also lower than the respective deficits of $747 billion and $2.74 trillion during the same periods in fiscal 2019 and 2020.

The CBO said it now expects the annual deficit for fiscal 2022 to be lower than the $1 trillion it projected in May.

Trade

The international trade deficit grew more than 36% under Trump and has continued to increase under Biden.

The latest BEA figures show that the U.S. imported over $971.5 billion more in goods and services than it exported during the most recent 12 months ending in May. That trade gap was $317.5 billion, or about 49%, higher than in 2020.

Through the first five months of 2022, the U.S. imported a monthly average of $91.2 billion more in goods and services than it exported. That means the country is still on track for an annual trade deficit of more than $1 trillion, which would be the largest one-year trade deficit on record.

Health Insurance

The latest information from the National Health Interview Survey shows that the number of Americans without health insurance dropped, but not significantly, from 2020 to 2021. The estimates, released in early May, are that 30 million people were uninsured at the time they were interviewed in 2021, 1.6 million fewer than the number uninsured in 2020.

In percentage terms, 9.2% of the population was uninsured at the time of the interview in 2021, compared with 9.7% in 2020.

The estimates are early release figures subject to some final editing and weighting.

The Census Bureau collects the data for the NHIS, but the bureau also releases an annual report on the number of people who were uninsured for the entire year (as opposed to those without health insurance at the time they were interviewed). The report for 2021 should be released in September.

The latest NHIS report also found that the percentage of nonelderly Americans with insurance through the Affordable Care Act exchanges went up under Biden: from 3.8% in 2020 to 4.3% in 2021.

Oil Production and Imports

U.S. crude oil production averaged roughly 11.41 million barrels per day during Biden’s most recent 12 months in office (ending in April), according to U.S. Energy Information Administration data published this month. That was 1.1% higher than the average daily amount of crude oil produced in 2020.

Over the first four months of 2022, the EIA estimates crude oil production averaged 11.5 million barrels per day — about 6.4% more than the average for the first four months of 2021. In its Short-Term Energy Outlook for June, the EIA projected that crude oil production would average 11.9 million barrels per day in 2022, which would be the highest annual average of any year except 2019.

However, U.S. crude oil imports in Biden’s last 12 months increased to an average of nearly 6.3 million barrels per day — up more than 6.8% from imports in 2020. The EIA currently forecasts that the U.S. will import about 3.1 million barrels per day more than it exports in 2022.

Carbon Emissions

In the most recent 12 months on record, there were more than 4.93 billion metric tons of emissions from the consumption of coal, natural gas and various petroleum products, according to the EIA’s latest estimates. That’s up over 7.7% from the almost 4.58 billion metric tons that were emitted in 2020, but still below the pre-pandemic total of about 5.15 billion metric tons emitted in 2019.

The EIA has said the increase “followed a rise in economic activity and energy consumption once the initial economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic began to subside.”

As of July, the EIA projects that energy-related CO2 emissions will increase by 1.5% this year. Natural gas and petroleum-related emissions are expected to increase in 2022 by 3.6% and 2.4%, respectively, while emissions from coal are projected to fall by 3.9%.

Crime

There are limited crime data for Biden’s time in office. The Major Cities Chiefs Association, which collects statistics from law enforcement agencies in big cities, reported that the number of homicides in the first quarter of 2022 in 68 agencies was slightly lower than the number in the first quarter of 2021. There were 1,977 homicides in the first quarter of this year, down 3% from a year prior.

Those quarterly numbers show rapes also declined, by 3.7%, while robberies and aggravated assaults increased by 10.6% and 3.2%, respectively.

The homicide figures are only for part of the year, but they show a reversal from the association’s recent reports. Homicides went up 6.2%, comparing all of 2020 to 2021, based on data from 70 law enforcement agencies, and before Biden had taken office, homicides climbed 32.7% from 2019 to 2020, according to figures from 66 agencies.

The nonpartisan think tank Council on Criminal Justice found similar recent trends. Its latest report shows a 5% increase in the number of homicides from 2020 to 2021 in 22 U.S. cities, but there was an even larger increase the year before. Over the two-year span, from 2019 to 2021, homicides went up 44%, “representing 1,298 additional lives lost.” The report noted the “homicide rate remains well below historical highs” in the early 1990s. The lead author of the council’s report, Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, told us homicides for these cities are down in the first six months of 2022, compared with the same time period in 2021.

Nationwide crime statistics from the FBI for 2021 aren’t available yet, and once they come out, there will be increased uncertainty around these figures due to a new crime reporting system. The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program had been using what was called the Summary Reporting System, but as of Jan. 1, 2021, law enforcement agencies were supposed to have transitioned to the National Incident-Based Reporting System. Many haven’t done so.

The FBI said in March and again in June that too few law enforcement agencies — under 60% — had filed reports to the FBI to allow for preliminary trend data for the entire population in its more limited quarterly reports.

Rosenfeld told us that for the upcoming 2021 annual report, the FBI will have actual numbers for about two-thirds of jurisdictions, but it will estimate, along with the Bureau of Justice Statistics, crime data for the rest. The actual numbers won’t include what he calls “the big shots” – New York City and Los Angeles – because they haven’t made that transition to the NIBRS. “It leaves us with a high degree of uncertainty over whether crime is going up or down nationwide and in local jurisdictions,” he said, noting that this problem comes at a time of heightened concern over crime. 

The FBI said the NIBRS would be an improvement, because it includes more information on the “circumstances and context” of crimes, such as the date and time, demographic information and more details about victims. It also allows for the reporting of more offenses than the old SRS and for the reporting of multiple offenses during the same incident. The SRS only allowed agencies to record the most serious crime in one incident, while the NIBRS can record up to 10 crimes per incident.

That means the new system also will inherently show more crimes. Rosenfeld said if that was the only problem, it could be interpreted properly. “But we’re going to have elevated crime rates for that reason and in addition we’re going to have uncertain crime rates because of all the estimation that will be done,” he said. “The mix is going to generate a great deal of concern, uncertainty and quite obviously, I think, debate about what the numbers actually mean.”

We have asked the FBI about this issue and when the 2021 report will be released, and we haven’t received a response.

Gun Sales

Gun purchases declined yet again during the second quarter of 2022, according to estimates from the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a gun industry trade group. 

Since the federal government doesn’t collect data on gun sales, the NSSF estimates gun sales by tracking the number of background checks for firearm sales based on the FBI’s National Instant Background Check System, or NICS. The NSSF-adjusted figures exclude background checks unrelated to sales, such as those required for concealed-carry permits.

The group reported that the NSSF-adjusted NICS total for background checks during the second quarter of the year was 3.92 million, which is about 9% less than the 4.3 million in the second quarter of 2021. It’s also more than 30% lower than the 5.63 million in Trump’s last full quarter in office.

Overall, there were 8.12 million background checks for firearm sales in the first six months of 2022. That was roughly 25% less than the 10.8 million in the last six months of 2020.

Stock Markets

A rough 2022 for the markets threatens to completely wipe out any gains that had been made under Biden.

The stock markets rose steadily under the previous two presidents. The S&P 500 index rose 166% over the eight years Obama was in office, and it climbed another 67.8% during Trump’s four years. But the S&P 500 is up 4.2% over the entirety of Biden’s presidency at the close of the market on July 20. For the year, it’s down 17.1%.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average, which is made up of 30 large corporations, is up just 3.1% since Biden took office. For the year, the Dow dropped 12.3%.

The NASDAQ composite index, made up of more than 3,000 companies, including many in the technology sector, has been hit the hardest — saddled by tech stocks that have been performing particularly poorly. The NASDAQ is down 9.8% since Biden took office and a staggering 24% so far this year. 

A year ago, Biden dismissed concerns about inflation and pointed to the stock market performance as a sign that the economy was strong.

“There’s nobody suggesting there’s unchecked inflation on the way — no serious economist,” Biden told reporters on July 19, 2021.

“I mean, look, the stock market is higher than it has been in all of history, even went down this month — even down this month,” Biden added. “Now, I don’t look at the stock market as a means by which to judge the economy like my predecessor did.  But he’d be very — he’d be talking to you every day for the last five months about how the stock market is so high — higher than any time in history, still higher than any time in history.”

But that is not the case anymore.

Judiciary Appointments

Supreme Court — Biden has won confirmation for one Supreme Court nominee, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. At the same point in his term, Trump also had won confirmation for one justice.

Court of Appeals — Biden has won confirmation for 17 U.S. Court of Appeals judges, as of July 20, including Jackson, who was an appeals court judge for nearly 10 months before the Senate voted to confirm her to the Supreme Court in April. Trump had won confirmation for 23 at the same point in his presidency. 

District Court — For federal District Courts, 53 of Biden’s nominees have been confirmed. At the same point in Trump’s tenure, 20 nominees had been confirmed.

Two U.S. Court of Federal Claims judges also have been confirmed under Biden.

There were 79 federal court vacancies, with 34 nominees pending, as of July 18.

Food Stamps

Since our last update, almost 109,000 more people came off the rolls for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps, according to the Department of Agriculture’s latest data.

As of April, the most recent month for which preliminary figures are available, about 41.23 million people were receiving food assistance. That figure is down 2.2%, or about 945,000, from the nearly 42.2 million who were accessing benefits when Biden took office in January 2021.

Under Trump, there were as few as 36.9 million collecting SNAP benefits in February 2020. But that figure increased to as many as 43 million beneficiaries in June 2020, as more people turned to the program during the height of the pandemic.

Thus far, the highest total under Biden was about 42.3 million in February 2021. The lowest was 40.8 million in August and September.

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The post Biden’s Numbers (Second Quarterly Update) appeared first on FactCheck.org.

The overall increase in fentanyl seized at the southwest border under President Joe Biden is nowhere near as high as a Republican ad misleadingly claims. U.S. border officials seized 13,021 pounds of the drug in Biden’s first full 15 months in office, which is 70% more than the 7,677 pounds seized in Donald Trump’s last full 15 months as president.

But an ad from Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson and the National Republican Senatorial Committee suggests that the increase under Biden was nearly 58 times higher.

“Joe Biden opened America’s borders, increasing the flow of deadly drugs into our communities,” the ad’s narrator says of the president, who does not have an “open borders” immigration policy, as the ad falsely suggests. For example, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials have continued to apprehend and expel tens of thousands of people each month. 

At the same time the narrator makes that claim, a graphic shown on screen says: “4,000 percent increase in fentanyl.” That was the multiyear increase for a tiny subset of fentanyl seizures at a point in 2021.

In a June 2 press release, Johnson’s campaign said its ad is “part of a seven-figure statewide television and digital ad buy with the NRSC.” The ad’s narrator goes on to say that “Biden’s putting our children and families at risk,” while Johnson “is warning everyone that drug traffickers are adding fentanyl to counterfeit pills.”

Johnson is up for reelection in 2022 in a Senate race that the Cook Political Report and other election prognosticators expect to be competitive.

The ad attributes the 4,000% figure to a June 29, 2021, NBC News article that focused on a three-year increase in fentanyl seized between legal ports of entry in only the El Paso, Texas, sector of the U.S. border with Mexico.

“Federal agents in this section of the southern border say they’ve seen a staggering 4,000 percent increase in fentanyl seizures over the last three years,” the article said. “Those busts are not at ports of entry, where most smuggled drugs are typically found. The Border Patrol says the rising amount of fentanyl is being found in the desert – transported by increasingly brazen smugglers who are exploiting stretched federal resources.”

NBC News reported that the amount of fentanyl seized in that area increased from 1 pound in fiscal year 2018 to 41 pounds through part of fiscal year 2021. Two pounds were seized in fiscal year 2019, and 9 pounds in fiscal year 2020.

The federal fiscal year, designated by the year in which it ends, runs from Oct. 1 through Sept. 30.

“So the big rise came during President Biden’s time in office even if the statistic cited spanned multiple years,” Alexa Henning, a Johnson campaign spokesperson, told FactCheck.org in an email explaining the ad’s use of the 4,000% figure.

But the ad still leaves the misleading impression that the increase was 4,000% under Biden, when it was 489% and only in that one area. The percentage increase under Biden is much smaller when factoring in fentanyl seizures in all regions of the border.

Total Seizures at the Southern Border

There are no comprehensive data on the total amount of illicit fentanyl smuggled into the U.S., so Republicans and others often point to the amount that is stopped from entering the country as a proxy for how much may get past officials undetected. 

Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid many times stronger than morphine and heroin, and can be fatal in very small doses. The drug has contributed to an increasing number of overdose deaths in the U.S. — sometimes when people unknowingly consume counterfeit pills and other illegally manufactured drugs that have been laced with fentanyl.

But the fentanyl captured between legal ports of entry in the El Paso region is a small fraction of the total amount seized across the entire southern border each year. For instance, Border Patrol agents in the southwest seized a total of 1,002 pounds of the drug in between legal ports of entry in FY 2021. That was about 27% more than the 786 pounds those officials seized in that region in FY 2020.

In addition, as mentioned in the NBC News article — and as we’ve previously reported — the vast majority of the fentanyl seized comes through legal ports of entry, not from illegal migration in the desert between those ports.

In total, there were 10,586 pounds seized in the southwest border region in FY 2021, including fentanyl captured during inspections by CBP’s Office of Field Operations, which manages the over 300 legal U.S. ports of entry. That was about 132% more than the 4,558 pounds seized by both the OFO and Border Patrol in FY 2020.

As for FY 2022, there had been 6,237 pounds of fentanyl seized through April, according to the most recent CBP data. That’s slightly more than the 6,096 pounds seized in the same seven-month period in FY 2021.

But the fiscal year comparisons obscure the fact that the steep rise in seized fentanyl started in mid-2020 under Trump, as the chart above illustrates. In fact, 36% of the fentanyl seized in FY 2021 was during the first four months of that fiscal year, when Trump was president for a full 111 of those 123 days.

Overall, about 13,021 pounds of fentanyl were seized in Biden’s first full 15 months in office, which is 70% more than the 7,677 pounds of fentanyl that were seized in Trump’s last full 15 months as president. That’s significantly less than 4,000%.

By citing a figure from the NBC News article about the multiyear increase in the relatively small amounts of fentanyl seized between legal entry ports in one section of the southern border, the anti-Biden/pro-Johnson ad gives viewers the misleading impression that the percentage increase under Biden has been much larger than it actually is.

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