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Quick Take
Abortion is illegal in Texas, with narrow exceptions for the life and health of a pregnant patient. Those who provide abortions can face stiff penalties, but Texas law specifies that those who get an abortion are not to be penalized. Posts have been circulating online falsely claiming that those who get an abortion in Texas can face fines and prison time.
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Texas has a long history when it comes to banning abortion.
Within a decade of joining the United States in 1845, Texas had criminalized abortion. The laws remained largely unchanged until a woman using the pseudonym Jane Roe challenged the state’s laws in a case that went to the U.S. Supreme Court and resulted, in 1973, in ensuring the right to access abortion across the country.
The Roe v. Wade decision stood until the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson in 2022, which overruled Roe.
Texas was one of 13 states, according to the Congressional Research Service, that had a so-called “trigger law” that would ban abortion in the event Roe was overturned.
The Texas trigger law, which was passed in 2021, became effective 30 days after the Dobbs ruling, making it illegal to have an abortion in Texas outside of narrow exceptions to preserve the life and health of a pregnant patient.
The law includes penalties for those who perform an abortion, including a minimum fine of $100,000, the loss of the health care provider’s medical license, and the potential for a life-time term in prison.
It also specifies that the person who gets an abortion will not be penalized. The law does not “authorize the initiation of a cause of action against or the prosecution of a woman on whom an abortion is performed or induced or attempted to be performed or induced.”
Another pre-Dobbs Texas abortion law has a similar provision. That law, commonly called SB8 or the Texas Heartbeat Act, was passed in 2021 and prohibited doctors from performing an abortion if a fetal heartbeat was detectable. That law also allows anyone to sue an abortion provider who violates it.
But, like the trigger law, SB8 specifies that those who get an abortion cannot be penalized. As codified, it says, “This subchapter may not be construed to: (1) authorize the initiation of a cause of action against or the prosecution of a woman on whom an abortion is performed or induced or attempted to be performed or induced in violation of this subchapter.”
There was some confusion after SB8 was passed and a 26-year-old woman in Starr County, Texas, was charged for an alleged “self-induced abortion.”
The district attorney dropped the charges, though, and issued a statement saying, “In reviewing applicable Texas law, it is clear that Ms. [Lizelle] Herrera cannot and should not be prosecuted for the allegation against her.”
Despite that, some falsehoods about the law persist online.
For example, Qasim Rashid, who is challenging incumbent Rep. Bill Foster in the Democratic primary for Illinois’ 11th Congressional District, posted one such claim on X, formerly known as Twitter.
There, he wrote, in part:
“Texas SB8:
•Doctor performs abortion: $100K fine, lose license, life in prison
•Woman gets abortion: $10K fine, life in prison”
Rashid appears to have conflated the penalties from the Texas trigger law with the penalties under SB8. But, more importantly, he falsely claimed that those who get an abortion would be subject to penalties.
That post has been copied and shared as a screenshot meme on other platforms, too.
We asked Rashid’s campaign for evidence to support the claim and were provided with links to two news stories, neither of which substantiated the claim.
In fact, one of the articles provided by the campaign says, “The statute specifically prohibits prosecuting a pregnant patient who undergoes an abortion.”
Sources
Texas State Law Library. History of Abortion Laws. Accessed 15 Feb 2024.
U.S. Department of State, Office of the the Historian. “The Annexation of Texas, the Mexican-American War, and the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, 1845–1848.” Accessed 15 Feb 2024.
Roe v. Wade. Case no. 70-18. U.S. Supreme Court. 22 Jan 1973.
Dobbs v. Jackson. Case no. 19–1392. U.S. Supreme Court. 24 Jun 2022.
Congressional Research Service. “State Laws Restricting or Prohibiting Abortion.” Updated 22 Mar 2023.
Texas State Legislature. Bill history HB 1280. Last action 16 Jun 2021.
Texas State Law Library. “Does Texas have trigger laws related to abortion?” Updated 9 Nov 2023.
Texas State Legislature. Bill history SB 8. Last action 19 May 2021.
Shapero, Julia. “Texas district attorney to drop murder charge in ‘self-induced abortion.’” Axios. 10 Apr 2022.
When Chuck Walter saw the permission slip from his daughter’s Miami school, he turned to social media.
Sharing an image of a form that requested parental signature for his first grader to attend a 30-minute “read-aloud” activity in which she would hear a “book by an African American author,” Walter aired his disbelief.
“I had to give permission for this or else my child would not participate???” Walter wrote Feb. 12 on X. The image showed that the library event would involve guests — “fireman/doctor/artist,” it read.
Walter told NBC News that he gave the Coral Way K-8 Center teacher “verbal consent” for the Black History Month activity but was told that the form must be signed or his child could not participate.
A photo of a permission slip Coral Way K-8 Center sent home to parents. (Screenshot via X)
The image sparked outcry. And soon Florida Education Commissioner Manny Diaz, Jr., responded on X calling news of the permission slip a “hoax.”
“Florida does not require a permission slip to teach African American history or to celebrate Black History Month,” Diaz wrote Feb. 13. “Any school that does this is completely in the wrong.”
Florida Department of Education spokesperson Cailey Myers also told PolitiFact that permission slips are not required for students to receive “ordinary instruction, like African American History, in Florida.” Education leaders did not answer our questions about what book was being read during the event.
So, what happened here? The incident appears to have arisen out of confusion over the Parental Rights in Education law, signed into law by Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2022 and expanded in 2023.
The legislation bans classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity in all public schools through 12th grade. The law’s supporters say it gives greater parental control over children’s education; critics have dubbed it the “Don’t Say Gay” law.
Rule requires parental consent for “field trips, extracurricular activities and supplemental programs”
One rule in the new law, 6A-10.085, requires schools to seek parental consent before children can participate in “field trips, extracurricular activities and supplemental programs.” It doesn’t say that teaching any particular subject, including Black history, requires permission.
The local district in late November implemented its permission slip policy to comply with the rule. The policy requires parental consent for extracurricular activities, including guest speakers, tutoring sessions and school dances.
Miami-Dade County Public Schools spokesperson Elmo Lugo said in an email to PolitiFact that the event’s description “may have caused confusion,” but said the district is working with schools to emphasize the importance of clearly stating what kinds of events require permission.
In this case, Lugo said, the permission slip was sent home “because guest speakers would participate during a school-authorized education-related activity,” not because it involved a Black author.
The state’s education department didn’t respond to PolitiFact’s questions about whether it believes the school district was interpreting the law correctly.
In an undated letter addressed to Coral Way’s principal, Florida Board of Education Chair Ben Gibson characterized the state’s policy as a way to “keep parents informed of the extracurricular activities their children are participating in” and said it appeared Coral Way had misinterpreted this as applying to “ordinary instruction.”
“This should be obvious on its face, and therefore, those providing guidance to you and your school are either grossly misinterpreting the rule or simply engaged in nothing more than a political ploy,” Gibson wrote, according to a copy of the letter that the Department of Education shared with PolitiFact.
Both before and after Walter’s X post, Miami-Dade school board members questioned how the rule was being executed and asked administrative staff to ask the state to clarify how to properly apply the rule.
“There’s no permission slip to teach Black history,” board member Steve Gallon III said during a Feb. 13 meeting. “And that’s the narrative that’s been formulated that I think we have to be bold and transparent and open about clarifying and debunking as much as we can.”
Teaching African American history is required by state statute and Miami-Dade schools comply with that throughout the year, the district’s chief academic officer, Lourdes Diaz, said in the meeting.
“For teachers to convey curriculum to students in the classroom — that is instruction — but activities that are sponsored by the school, created for students to study or participate in that are outside of that would require a permission form,” Diaz told school board members. “But the instruction of a required topic, be it Black history, Holocaust education, women’s history, all the other ones, does not require a form, per se.”
RELATED: Ron DeSantis said that not ‘a single book’ was banned in Florida. Districts have removed dozens
The mRNA COVID-19 vaccines have a good safety record and have saved millions of lives. But viral posts claim the contrary, citing a recent peer-reviewed article authored by known COVID-19 misinformation spreaders and published in a controversial journal. The paper repeats previously debunked claims.
How safe are the COVID-19 vaccines?
How safe are the COVID-19 vaccines?
More than half a billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines have now been administered in the U.S. and only a few, very rare, safety concerns have emerged. The vast majority of people experience only minor, temporary side effects such as pain at the injection site, fatigue, headache, or muscle pain — or no side effects at all. As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said, these vaccines “have undergone and will continue to undergo the most intensive safety monitoring in U.S. history.”
A small number of severe allergic reactions known as anaphylaxis, which are expected with any vaccine, have occurred with the authorized and approved COVID-19 vaccines. Fortunately, these reactions are rare, typically occur within minutes of inoculation and can be treated. Approximately 5 per million people vaccinated have experienced anaphylaxis after a COVID-19 vaccine, according to the CDC.
To make sure serious allergic reactions can be identified and treated, all people receiving a vaccine should be observed for 15 minutes after getting a shot, and anyone who has experienced anaphylaxis or had any kind of immediate allergic reaction to any vaccine or injection in the past should be monitored for a half hour. People who have had a serious allergic reaction to a previous dose or one of the vaccine ingredients should not be immunized. Also, those who shouldn’t receive one type of COVID-19 vaccine should be monitored for 30 minutes after receiving a different type of vaccine.
There is evidence that the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna mRNA vaccines may rarely cause inflammation of the heart muscle (myocarditis) or of the surrounding lining (pericarditis), particularly in male adolescents and young adults.
Based on data collected through August 2021, the reporting rates of either condition in the U.S. are highest in males 16 to 17 years old after the second dose (105.9 cases per million doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine), followed by 12- to 15-year-old males (70.7 cases per million). The rate for 18- to 24-year-old males was 52.4 cases and 56.3 cases per million doses of Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, respectively.
Health officials have emphasized that vaccine-related myocarditis and pericarditis cases are rare and the benefits of vaccination still outweigh the risks. Early evidence suggeststhese myocarditis cases are less severe than typical ones. The CDC has also noted that most patients who were treated “responded well to medicine and rest and felt better quickly.”
The Johnson & Johnson vaccine has been linked to an increased risk of rare blood clots combined with low levels of blood platelets, especially in women ages 30 to 49. Early symptoms of the condition, which is known as thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome, or TTS, can appear as late as three weeks after vaccination and include severe or persistent headaches or blurred vision, leg swelling, and easy bruising or tiny blood spots under the skin outside of the injection site.
According to the CDC, TTS has occurred in around 4 people per million doses administered. As of early April, the syndrome has been confirmed in 60 cases, including nine deaths, after more than 18.6 million doses of the J&J vaccine. Although TTS remains rare, because of the availability of mRNA vaccines, which are not associated with this serious side effect, the FDA on May 5 limited authorized use of the J&J vaccine to adults who either couldn’t get one of the other authorized or approved COVID-19 vaccines because of medical or access reasons, or only wanted a J&J vaccine for protection against the disease. Several months earlier, on Dec. 16, 2021, the CDC had recommended the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna shots over J&J’s.
The J&J vaccine has also been linked to an increased risk of Guillain-Barré Syndrome, a rare disorder in which the immune system attacks nerve cells. Most people who develop GBS fully recover, although some have permanent nerve damage and the condition can be fatal.
Safety surveillance data suggest that compared with the mRNA vaccines, which have not been linked to GBS, the J&J vaccine is associated with 15.5 additional GBS cases per million doses of vaccine in the three weeks following vaccination. Most reported cases following J&J vaccination have occurred in men 50 years old and older.
Link to this
Full Story
The safety of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna is supported by the rigorous clinical trials run prior to their release and numerous studies conducted since. Hundreds of millions of people have been vaccinated in the U.S., many with multiple doses, and serious side effects are rare.
COVID-19 vaccines have also been shown to be effective in reducing the risk of severe forms of the disease. Multiple studies have estimated that the COVID-19 vaccines saved millions of lives across the globe.
But an article — written by misinformation spreaders who oppose COVID-19 vaccination — that claims to have reviewed the original trials and “other relevant studies” largely ignores this body of evidence. Instead, the review, which calls for a “global moratorium” on the mRNA vaccines, cites multiple flawed or criticized studies — many of which we’ve written about before — to falsely claim the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines have caused “extensive, well-documented” serious adverse events and have killed nearly 14 times as many people as they saved.
The article was peer-reviewed and published in Cureus, an open-access online medical journal that prioritizes fast publication and has published problematic studies before, as we will explain.
Social media posts that share the incorrect conclusions of the review have gone viral.
“mRNA COVID-19 vaccines caused more deaths than saved: study,” reads a Feb. 4 Instagram post that shared a screenshot of a headline by the Epoch Times.
One author of the review — as well as other social media users — are also using the fact that the paper was published as proof that the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines are unsafe.
“People have said I’m a misinformation spreader because since May 2021, I have been publicly saying the COVID vaccines are not safe. Now the medical peer-reviewed literature shows I was right. Do you believe me now?” Steve Kirsch, a review co-author and a former tech entrepreneur who lacks biomedical training, said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, on Jan. 30 (emphasis is his).
“!! TRUST THE #SCIENCE !!,” the author of a viral post wrote on Instagram on Feb. 7. The post included a screenshot of a news story titled “Mainstream science mulls ‘global moratorium’ on COVID vaccines as cancers rise, boosters flub,” and the statement “Covid vaccines *may* cause cancer. You don’t say.”
Just because a paper is published does not make it correct. While peer review is useful in weeding out bad science, it’s not foolproof, and the rigor and processes vary by journal. This review, which many experts have criticized, is an outlier, not “mainstream science.” And as we’ve written, there’s no evidence mRNA COVID-19 vaccines cause cancer and resulted in millions of deaths.
Anti-Vaccine Authors and Debunked Claims
Many of the review’s authors have a history of spreading COVID-19 or vaccine misinformation. This includes Kirsch, who has repeatedly pushed the incorrect idea that the COVID-19 vaccines have killed millions of people worldwide, as well as Dr. Peter McCullough, Stephanie Seneff and Jessica Rose.
McCullough still recommends treating COVID-19 patients with hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, even though both have been shown not to work against the disease. He also promotes and sells “spike protein detoxification” products for people who have been vaccinated, despite no evidence that vaccinated people need any such detox.
Seneff is a computer scientist who has promoted the false notion that vaccines cause autism. She previously co-authored a review paper with McCullough, which the Cureus review cites, that misused data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System to baselessly claim the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines suppress the innate immune system, as we reported. Rose has also been accused of misusing VAERS data to claim vaccines are not safe — a common deception among the anti-vaccination community.
The Cureus review cites and even republishes a figure from one of Rose’s Substack posts about the supposedly alarming number of VAERS reports for “autoimmune disorders” following COVID-19 vaccination compared with influenza vaccines. The review claims the increased reporting “represents an immense safety signal.” But as we’ve explained before, the higher number of VAERS reports for the COVID-19 vaccines can be explained by multiple factors, such as increased awareness and stricter reporting requirements – and does not in and of itself constitute a safety signal. A report can be submitted by anyone and does not mean that a vaccine caused a particular problem.
The review paper, titled “COVID-19 mRNA Vaccines: Lessons Learned from the Registrational Trials and Global Vaccination Campaign,” repeats many claims we’ve already written about, based on studies or analyses that have been widely criticized or debunked.
To claim the vaccines cause “serious harms to humans,” for example, the review draws on a problematic reanalysis of the adverse events reported in the original trials that was published in the journal Vaccine in 2022. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Dr. Joseph Ladapo, the state’s surgeon general, have cited the paper to argue that the vaccines are too risky. But as we’ve written — and is detailed in a commentary article published in the same journal — the paper has multiple methodological flaws, including how it counted the adverse events.
The review also uncritically cites an unpublished analysis by former physics professor Denis Rancourt that alleged that some 17 million people died from the COVID-19 vaccines. We recently explained that the report erroneously ignored deaths from COVID-19 and that such estimates are implausible. And the review recycles unsupported claims about “high levels of DNA contamination” in the mRNA vaccines and the possibility that such DNA fragments “will integrate into the human genome” and cause cancer. As we’ve detailed, trace amounts of residual DNA are expected in vaccines, but there is no evidence the DNA can alter a person’s DNA or cause cancer.
Photo by Visoot Uthairam via Getty Images.
Finally, the review highlighted findings from a Cleveland Clinic observational study that it called the “best evidence for the failure of the COVID-19 mRNA vaccine’s ability to confer protection against COVID-19.” The study, which identified a correlation between more COVID-19 vaccine doses and a higher rate of testing positive for a coronavirus infection, has frequently been cited by those opposed to vaccination. But as we’ve explained, the finding runs counter to that of many other studies, which have generally found increased protection with more doses. And the paper did not demonstrate that more doses actually cause an increased risk of infection. In fact, many experts suspect that the association is likely the result of other differences between people who received a different number of doses. Moreover, the primary purpose of vaccination is to protect against severe disease — and there is abundant evidence that the COVID-19 vaccines have been very successful on that front.
“Lessons learned? More like conspiracies spun,” wrote surgical oncologist Dr. David Gorski in a post about the review in his blog Respectful Insolence.
The authors of the review have also been criticized for citing their own studies in the review and for including non-scientific publications as primary sources.
“BTW, the McCullough, Kirsch, etc. Cureus paper that is purportedly a scientific review article references trialsitetnews, epoch times, brownstone, the spectator, children’s health defense, and conservative review as primary sources for some of their points, as well as 11 substack articles/blogs, a youtube/twitter video, and 2 explicit anti-vaccine books, plus a large number of self-citations from the review authors,” Jeffrey S. Morris, director of the division of biostatistics in the department of biostatistics, epidemiology and informatics at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, wrote on X on Feb. 1.
Peer Review Doesn’t Guarantee Scientific Quality
Much of the complimentary coverage of the review paper by some of the usual misinformation spreaders has emphasized that it was published in a peer-reviewed journal.
“A review paper published last week in the journal Cureus is the first peer-reviewed paper to call for a global moratorium on the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines,” declared a Jan. 29 article published on Robert F. Kennedy’s anti-vaccine website, Children’s Health Defense. The story also received attention on social media.
Peer review, or the process of having fellow scientists provide feedback on a manuscript and whether it is good enough to publish, can be immensely helpful in ensuring that a given paper does not contain major flaws or errors. But peer review is only as good as the feedback provided — and it does not automatically mean the paper can be trusted. Nor are all peer-reviewed journals the same, since each has different standards and reputations.
Cureus is unusual in that it focuses on publishing papers quickly and advertises “efficient” peer review and a “hassle-free” publishing experience. The journal’s metrics for the last six months indicate that the average time from submission to publication is 33 days and that the acceptance rate is 51%. For context, the prestigious journal Nature — which some posts have misleadingly likened Cureus to, as they share the same parent publisher — has a median time of 267 days for submission to acceptance and an 8% acceptance rate. Per the article information for this review paper, the peer-review process took 77 days.
In 2015, responding to concerns about the journal and its fast peer-review process, the founder, president and co-editor-in-chief of Cureus, Dr. John R. Adler, said that “by design peer rejection is not a big part of our review process,” and that the journal also relies on post-publication review to “sort out what is quality/important.”
A paper by Emory University librarians that was presented at a 2022 conference classified Cureus as potentially “untrustworthy or predatory.” The journal is available on PubMed Central, the National Institutes of Health’s database of biomedical research, but is not indexed on MEDLINE, which requires some vetting for inclusion. (A paper’s appearance in either database does not imply any kind of endorsement by the NIH.)
Cureus, notably, published two problematic studies about ivermectin for COVID-19 in 2022. As we reported at the time, the results of the studies were inconsistent with stronger studies that did not find any benefit of using ivermectin for COVID-19. Both studies had methodological flaws and were authored by ivermectin activists — a fact that was not disclosed at the time of publication.
Although even the best journals occasionally retract published studies, Cureus has ended up multiple times in the pages of Retraction Watch, a blog and online database of retractions — most recently on Jan. 26 for 56 studies retracted for faked authorship nearly two years after they were first flagged. In 2022, Retraction Watch reported that a study retracted by Frontiers in Medicine was later updated and published in Cureus.
Editor’s note: SciCheck’s articles providing accurate health information and correcting health misinformation are made possible by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The foundation has no control over FactCheck.org’s editorial decisions, and the views expressed in our articles do not necessarily reflect the views of the foundation.
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Watson, Oliver J., et al. “Global impact of the first year of COVID-19 vaccination: a mathematical modelling study.” Infectious Diseases. 23 Jun 2022.
Trang, Brittany. “Covid vaccines averted 3 million deaths in U.S., according to new study.” Stat. 13 Dec 2022.
“COVID-19 vaccinations have saved more than 1.4 million lives in the WHO European Region, a new study finds.” WHO. Press release. 16 Jan 2024.
Mead, M. Nathaniel, et al. “COVID-19 mRNA Vaccines: Lessons Learned from the Registrational Trials and Global Vaccination Campaign.” Cureus. 24 Jan 2024.
Yandell, Kate. “Tucker Carlson Video Spreads Falsehoods on COVID-19 Vaccines, WHO Accord.” FactCheck.org. 12 Jan 2024.
Yandell, Kate. “Faulty Science Underpins Florida Surgeon General’s Call to Halt mRNA COVID-19 Vaccination.” FactCheck.org. 5 Jan 2024.
Jaramillo, Catalina. “mRNA Vaccines Protect Against COVID-19 Mortality, Contrary to Misleading Posts.” FactCheck.org. 26 May 2023.
Jaramillo, Catalina. “COVID-19 Vaccine Benefits Outweigh Small Risks, Contrary to Flawed Claim From U.K. Cardiologist.” FactCheck.org. 8 May 2023.
Yandell, Kate. “Cleveland Clinic Study Did Not Show Vaccines Increase COVID-19 Risk.” FactCheck.org. 16 Jun 2023.
Jaramillo, Catalina. “Autopsy Study Doesn’t Show COVID-19 Vaccines Are Unsafe.” FactCheck.org. 21 Dec 2022.
Swann, Sara. “Experts say mRNA COVID-19 vaccines have saved millions of lives, not caused mass deaths.” PolitiFact. 9 Feb 2024.
Jaramillo, Catalina. “Clinical Trials Show Ivermectin Does Not Benefit COVID-19 Patients, Contrary to Social Media Claims.” FactCheck.org. 15 Sep 2022.
Robertson, Lori. “No New Revelation on Hydroxychloroquine and COVID-19.” FactCheck.org. 2 Jul 2021.
Gorski, David. “2021: The year the weaponization of VAERS went mainstream.” Respectful Insolence. 27 Dec 2021.
McDonald, Jessica. “What VAERS Can and Can’t Do, and How Anti-Vaccination Groups Habitually Misuse Its Data.” FactCheck.org. 6 Jun 2023.
Fraiman, Joseph. “Serious adverse events of special interest following mRNA COVID-19 vaccination in randomized trials in adults.” Vaccine. 22 Sep 2022.
McDonald, Jessica, and Catalina Jaramillo. “DeSantis’ Dubious COVID-19 Vaccine Claims.” FactCheck.org. 2 May 2023.
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Kansas City authorities announced charges Feb. 16 against two juveniles in connection with the mass shooting at a Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl celebration that killed one woman and injured 22 more.
The 16th Circuit Court of Jackson County’s Juvenile Officer did not release the names of suspects facing gun-related and resisting-arrest charges, which is typical for juvenile cases. But that didn’t stop social media accounts from running with a fictitious suspect name.
Several Instagram posts shared a photo of a man detained by police and claimed the suspect was named “Sahil Omar.” These posts went on to say he was living in the country illegally.
“At least one of Kansas City shooters identified as Sahil Omar, a 44 year old illegal immigrant,” said the photo caption of a man in a reddish orange jumpsuit detained by police. “Biden has failed to protect America from an invasion and terrorism.”
Missouri state Sen. Rick Brattin, R-Harrisonville, reshared a post claiming “Sahil Omar” was the shooter; Brattin implored President Joe Biden to “CLOSE THE BORDER!” State Sen. Denny Hoskins, R-Warrensburg, also wrote on X that “at least one of the alleged shooters is an illegal immigrant.”
The Instagram posts were flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)
Despite the backstory, this name is a frequent hoax that follows mass shootings.
The original photo, taken by Agence France-Presse, did not identify the person detained in the aftermath of the disrupted Kansas City Chiefs victory celebration.
Social media posts have previously linked a person named “Sahil Omar” to other fatal incidents in recent months.
In November 2023, after a car crashed into a U.S.-Canada border checkpoint, some social media posts claimed it was a terrorist attack by “Sahil Omar.” Two people (none named Sahil Omar) inside the car died. The FBI said no explosions were found and ruled out terrorist connections.
In December 2023, the name Sahil Omar was also falsely connected to a University of Nevada, Las Vegas, shooting that killed three faculty members and injured another. Police identified the suspect as Anthony Polito, a 67-year-old business professor, who died in a shootout with officers.
The name Sahil Omar also circulated in January on social media as the suspect behind a hotel explosion in Fort Worth, Texas. Local fire officials said the explosion was likely due to a gas leak.
We rate the claim that police arrested a shooting suspect named Sahil Omar Pants on Fire!
Para leer en español, vea esta traducción de Google Translate.
In directing the House to open a formal impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden, then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy cited, among other things, an unverified report from a “trusted FBI informant” who alleged that a Ukrainian company gave “a bribe to the Biden family.”
But that informant has now been indicted for lying to the FBI about the bribe.
Alexander Smirnov, who was arrested Feb. 14 at the Las Vegas airport, was indicted for providing “false derogatory information to the FBI” about Biden and his son Hunter in 2020 after Biden became a presidential candidate, according to a Department of Justice press release. His bribery story unraveled after the FBI last year interviewed Smirnov and reviewed his travel records, messages and emails, which “were in direct conflict with what he reported [to the FBI] in 2020,” the indictment said.
Smirnov, who has been an FBI “confidential human source” since 2010, made his false claims about the president and his son, “despite repeated admonishments that he must provide truthful information to the FBI and that he must not fabricate evidence,” the indictment said.
Republicans and the ‘Alleged Criminal Scheme’
We have written several articles about the unverified FBI report, which was first revealed when Sen. Chuck Grassley and Rep. James Comer sent a letter on May 3 to Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray.
In their letter, Grassley and Comer said they learned from a whistleblower that “the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) possess an unclassified FD-1023 form that describes an alleged criminal scheme involving then-Vice President Biden and a foreign national relating to the exchange of money for policy decisions.” Comer issued a subpoena seeking the FD-1023.
Rep. James Comer of Kentucky speaks with reporters outside the House chamber at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 18. Photo by Kent Nishimura/Getty Images.
An FD-1023 form is used by FBI agents “to record raw, unverified reporting from confidential human sources (CHSs),” the FBI explained in a message to colleagues in response to the subpoena. “FD-1023s merely document that information; they do not reflect the conclusions of investigators based on a fuller context or understanding. Recording this information does not validate it, establish its credibility, or weigh it against other information known or developed by the FBI in our investigations.”
In July, Grassley and Comer, chairman of the House oversight committee, obtained and released the unverified FBI report, which alleged that Joe and Hunter Biden each received a $5 million bribe from Burisma, a Ukrainian oil and gas company, when Joe Biden was vice president. Hunter Biden served on the company’s board of directors from 2014 to 2019.
Smirnov, who was not identified in the FBI document, told the FBI in 2020 about a meeting in Vienna that he claimed to have with Burisma owner Mykola Zlochevsky in December 2015 and subsequent phone calls with the Burisma owner in 2016 and 2017. Zlochevsky allegedly told Smirnov that he was forced to pay the bribes to make sure that the Ukrainian prosecutor general at the time, Viktor Shokin, would be fired.
As we have written, then-President Donald Trump and other Republicans made the unsubstantiated claim during the 2020 election that Biden, as vice president, sought to fire Shokin to protect Burisma from prosecution. In fact, the evidence shows that the United States and its allies sought Shokin’s removal because they believed Ukraine wasn’t doing enough to clean up government corruption.
Regardless of the FBI’s warnings about the “raw, unverified reporting” in the FD-1023, Republicans claimed to have a smoking gun.
“Joe Biden is a criminal and is compromised!” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said, tweeting images of the unvetted FBI report on the day it was released. “IMPEACH BIDEN!!!”
On Fox News, Larry Kudlow, a former Trump aide, interviewed Sen. Ted Cruz about the release of the FBI report. “Every day, the evidence keeps mounting and the evidence that is coming in is number one, of a widespread bribery scheme of Joe Biden and Hunter Biden and the entire Biden family, to extract bribes from foreign nationals,” Cruz said.
Later in July, after Hunter Biden’s business partner, Devon Archer, testified before the House oversight committee, Comer told Fox News: “Every day, this bribery scandal becomes more credible.” As we wrote when the transcript of the Archer testimony was released, Comer made the “bribery scandal” comment even though Archer testified that he was unaware of a bribe and skeptical that it happened.
When McCarthy directed the House to launch a formal impeachment inquiry, the conservative Newsmax website called the bribery allegation “the heart” of the impeachment attempt because “bribery is one of the few crimes spelled out as an impeachable offense in the Constitution.” Newsmax quoted Rep. Jim Jordan, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, as saying: “The impeachable offense is — I think, the key thing is in Burisma.”
Contrary to the claims of Comer and other Republicans, the FBI now has evidence that Smirnov’s tale about the bribes was fabricated.
What’s in the Indictment
In the indictment, the FBI said that Smirnov first mentioned Burisma in an FD-1023 form in 2017. At that time, Smirnov recounted a March 2017 phone call with Zlochevsky “concerning Burisma’s interest in acquiring a U.S. company.” At the time, Joe Biden was no longer in office.
Smirnov mentioned that Hunter Biden was on the Burisma board, but there was no mention of bribes. The FBI report at the time described the mention of Hunter Biden as a “brief, non-relevant discussion.”
“Notably, the Defendant did not report in 2017 that in the preceding two years, Burisma Official 1 [Zlochevsky] admitted to the Defendant that he had paid Public Official 1 [Joe Biden] $5 million when Public Official 1 was still in office, as the Defendant later claimed,” the indictment said.
U.S. v. Smirnov: Three years later, in June 2020, the Defendant reported, for the first time, two meetings in 2015 and/or 2016, during the Obama-Biden Administration, in which he claimed executives associated with Burisma, including Burisma Official 1 [Zlochevsky], admitted to him that they hired Businessperson 1 [Hunter Biden] to “protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems,” and later that they had specifically paid $5 million each to Public Official 1 [Joe Biden] and Businessperson 1, when Public Official 1 was still in office, so that “[Businessperson 1] will take care of all those issues through his dad,” referring to a criminal investigation being conducted by the then-Ukrainian Prosecutor General into Burisma and to “deal with [the then-Ukrainian Prosecutor General].”
In the June 2020 FD-1023 form, which is the one that Grassley and Comer released, Smirnov also recounts two phone calls with Zlochevsky in which the Burisma owner mentions the bribes.
The indictment called these meetings and phone calls “fabrications.” In fact, the indictment said, Smirnov did not meet or talk with any Burisma officials prior to 2017, contrary to what he told FBI agents in 2020, and he did not travel to Vienna in December 2015, when he supposedly met Zlochevzky.
“In short,” the indictment said, Smirnov “transformed his routine and unextraordinary business contacts with Burisma in 2017 and later into bribery allegations against … the presumptive nominee of one of the two major political parties for President, after expressing bias against Public Official 1 and his candidacy.”
The indictment included screen grabs of messages between Smirnov and his FBI handler that indicate Smirnov’s alleged bias against Biden.
For example, Smirnov messaged the FBI agent on May 19, 2020, and said, “It’s all over the news in Russia and Ukraine as well as live calls between [Biden] and [then-Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko]. Smells bad for Biden.” Minutes later, he followed up with messages that said: “[Biden] going to jail ))))” and “Dems tried to impeach [Trump] for same. Even Less.”
Smirnov was referring to a recording of a phone call between Biden and Poroshenko that was edited and released by Andrii Derkach, who was later described as an “active Russian agent” when the Treasury Department under Trump sanctioned Derkach for interfering in the 2020 presidential election.
“From at least late 2019 through mid-2020, Derkach waged a covert influence campaign centered on cultivating false and unsubstantiated narratives concerning U.S. officials in the upcoming 2020 Presidential Election, spurring corruption investigations in both Ukraine and the United States designed to culminate prior to election day,” the Sept. 10, 2020, Treasury press release said.
Origins of Smirnov’s Bribery Allegation
Smirnov’s bribery allegation surfaced as part of a larger review into Biden and Ukraine that was ordered by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in early 2020, when Trump was still in office, the indictment said.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington, D.C., directed its Pittsburgh office to assess unsubstantiated allegations made by Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, about Biden and Ukraine.
“As part of that process, FBI Pittsburgh opened an assessment, 58A-PG-3250958, and in the course of that assessment identified the 2017 1023 in FBI holdings and shared it with USAO WDPA,” the indictment said, referring to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Western District of Pennsylvania in Pittsburgh.
As part of the review, the FBI’s Pittsburgh Field Office in June 2020 asked Smirnov’s handler to get more information regarding Smirnov’s mention in 2017 of a “brief, non-relevant discussion” about Hunter Biden, as it was described in the 2017 FBI form.
That same day, Smirnov told his FBI handler about the bribery allegations — which were memorialized in an FD-1023 on June 30, 2020, that Grassley and Comer would later release three years later.
But the FBI could not corroborate Smirnov’s allegations at that time.
U.S. v. Smirnov: After the Defendant made these reports, the FBI asked him for travel records, which he provided, in an attempt to determine whether the information he provided was accurate.
By August 2020, FBI Pittsburgh concluded that all reasonable steps had been completed regarding the Defendant’s allegations and that their assessment, 58A-PG-3250958, should be closed. On August 12, 2020, FBI Pittsburgh was informed that the then-FBI Deputy Director and then-Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General of the United States concurred that it should be closed.
That might have been the end of the matter if not for congressional Republicans who released the 2020 FD-1023 and accused the Biden Justice Department of bias and failing to investigate the allegations of bribery.
“I’ve repeatedly asked since going public with the existence of the 1023, what, if anything, has the Justice Department and FBI done to investigate?” Grassley, the Iowa Republican, asked in a June statement.
That month, the Justice Department convened a grand jury. A month later, it asked the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Delaware, which was already investigating Hunter Biden on gun and tax charges, to assist the FBI in its investigation.
On Aug. 11, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed David Weiss, the U.S. attorney for the District of Delaware, as special counsel of the Hunter Biden investigation.
In September, FBI agents interviewed Smirnov about the bribery allegations contained in the FD-1023 from 2020, and soon after, Smirnov’s tale of bribery unraveled and charges were brought.
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An Instagram video featuring Russian President Vladimir Putin recycles the consistently debunked conspiracy theory that the 1969 U.S. moon landing was fake.
In the clip, a robotic narrator speaks as the video shows Putin looking at a screen showing photos of astronauts on the moon.
“Google presents its latest artificial intelligence to Vladimir Putin, and explains that basically this artificial intelligence can analyze any video to determine if it’s fake or not,” the voice says. When asked which video to verify, Putin chose the moon landing, according to the clip, and “it turns out,” the voice exclaims, “Google’s AI concluded that this video was fake” perplexing Google’s staff and Putin.
The narrator then claims that NASA released a statement admitting that the video is fake because they “lost the original.” Text superimposed on the video read: “Google proves that no one ever went to the moon.”
The post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)
First, the moon landing was real. The Apollo 11 spaceflight landed at Tranquility Base on July 20, 1969, and Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to set foot on the moon.
Google has never proved otherwise — nor does the company claim that it has.
Google’s press office told PolitiFact in a statement that Google’s AI did not discover that the footage from the moon landing was fake. And Google was not involved in the Russia demonstration depicted in the post’s video, the statement said.
The video clip of Putin comes from “Artificial Intelligence Journey 2023, a November conference organized by a Russian state-owned banking and financial services company, Sberbank, according to the Kremlin’s website.
Russian television station REN TV reported that the head of Sberbank’s data research department, Nikolai Gerasimenko, claimed he had analyzed a photo of the 1969 American moon landing with the help of Google’s neural network. Gerasimenko said the network found that the image could be fabricated or manipulated.
“Here, their neural network marks in red those places that it considers fake,” the Russian TV report quoted Gerasimenko as saying. “That is, almost all the objects in this photo seem unreal to it. At the same time, the photograph of the Chinese lunar rover does not raise any special questions.”
The report said neither which program Gerasimenko used, nor which photo was evaluated. There is also no evidence Putin was told that “Google’s AI” found that the entire American moon landing was fake. And, even if an AI program shows inconsistencies in an image, these tools aren’t always reliable.
PolitiFact contacted NASA for comment but did not hear back by publication.
And it was about 15 years ago — not recently, as the post claims — when NASA released restored copies of the Apollo 11 moonwalk after announcing years earlier that the original recordings were mistakenly erased and reused.
NASA’s original recordings of the moon landing were accidentally part of a batch of about 200,000 tapes that were magnetically erased and reused to save money in the mid-2000s, Reuters reported in 2009. NASA eventually found good copies in news archives and some recordings in film vaults at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, which were digitized with other pieces to make new renderings.
We rate this claim False.
RELATED: Some TV coverage of the 1969 moon landing was animated, but that doesn’t mean the event was fake
RELATED: A remotely controlled camera captured Apollo 17 leaving the moon, not some doomed astronaut
Para leer en español, vea esta traducción de Google Translate.
Quick Take
Kansas City authorities charged two juvenile suspects with crimes connected to the Feb. 14 shootings at the Kansas City Chiefs’ victory celebration, in which one person was killed and 22 others were injured. Social media posts falsely identified one of the shooting suspects as “Sahil Omar, a 44 year old illegal.” A police spokesperson said that was a “fake claim.”
Full Story
The Kansas City Chiefs’ Super Bowl victory parade and celebration on Feb. 14 ended with a mass shooting outside the city’s Union Station building. One woman, radio DJ Lisa Lopez-Galvan, was killed, and 22 other people — half of them younger than 16 — were injured during the shootings and panic that followed, the Associated Press reported.
Kansas City, Missouri, police detained two juvenile suspects who were charged on Feb. 16 with gun-related offenses and resisting arrest, authorities told the AP. The shootings appeared to have been sparked by a dispute, police said, and several guns were found at the scene. A third person, also a juvenile, had been detained but was released, police told ABC News.
None of those detained has been identified by police. But some social media posts have falsely claimed that one of those held by authorities was a 44-year-old “illegal immigrant.”
Police respond to a shooting at Union Station during the Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl LVIII victory parade on Feb. 14 in Kansas City, Missouri. Photo by Jamie Squire via Getty Images.
“At least one of the Kansas City Chiefs parade shooters identified as Sahil Omar, a 44 year old illegal immigrant. Biden has failed to protect America from invasion and terrorism,” one Instagram post claimed. The post, which shows a photo of a man in a red sweatsuit sitting on a curb between police officers, received more than 1,200 likes.
But the claim is wrong.
A Kansas City Police spokesperson told us in a Feb. 16 email that police have seen the post and image on social media and called it “false information/fake claim.”
“The two people that remain in custody are juveniles, thus not the individual named Omar. There’s no indication that person is involved in the shooting,” the police spokesperson said.
USA Today reported that the name Sahil Omar had previously been falsely linked in social media posts to a hotel explosion in Fort Worth, Texas, on Jan. 8, and to a shooting at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, in December.
Sources
Associated Press. “Things to know about the shooting at the Kansas City Chiefs’ Super Bowl celebration.” 16 Feb 2024.
Byik, Andre. “‘Sahil Omar’ not a suspect in Kansas City Chiefs parade shooting.” USA Today. 15 Feb 2024.
Haworth, Jon and Emily Shapiro. “Kansas City Chiefs parade shooting: Police determining ‘applicable charges’ for juvenile suspects.” ABC News. 16 Feb 2024.
Ingram, Nick, Scott McFetridge and Jim Salter. “2 juveniles charged in mass shooting at the Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl parade.” 16 Feb 2024.
Kansas City Police spokesperson. Email to FactCheck.org. 16 Feb 2024.
How many teachers could a half a billion dollars pay for using savings from Wisconsin expanding Medicaid? That’s the hypothetical that was raised by state Sen. Chris Larson, D-Milwaukee.
On X, Larson said Wisconsin is one of 10 states that have not expanded Medicaid but if it had done so, the state would have saved $530 million in the 2021-23 budget cycle.
Then he said: “For that amount, we could have hired 3,287 additional K-12 teachers at the statewide median salary, including benefits.That’s an average of 7.8 more educators PER DISTRICT.”
That seems like a lot of teachers.
Medicaid expansion savings
We reached out to Larson’s office for evidence to support his claim and staffers sent us a January 2023 memo from the Legislative Fiscal Bureau that showed the state would have saved $530 million in the 2021-23 budget if Medicaid had been expanded in 2014.
The Republican-controlled Legislature and previous Gov. Scott Walker, a fellow Republican, have been opposed to expanding Medicaid which would provide the state more federal funding.
Medicaid expansion covers the vast majority of the costs of expansion coverage, while generating offsetting savings and, for some states, revenue increases, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan research and policy institute.
So, he’s right on that point. But what about the number of teachers?
Lason’s office said it used the median district average salary and fringe benefits from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction dashboard for 2022-23.
We went to the department’s dashboard and found the same numbers as Larson. The median average salary is $56,364 and the median average fringe benefits is $24,244. That makes the average teacher compensation including benefits $80,608.
From here it’s simple math. You take the $530 million, divided by the total compensation $80,608 and then divide that number by 2 for the two years the budget covers and it equals roughly 3,287 teachers.
You divide that by 421, the number of school districts in the state, and you get 7.8, which is the potential number of teachers that could be hired per district using the potential savings.
Meanwhile, Bob Lang, executive director of the Legislative Fiscal Bureau said, “using the information that (Larson) received from this office and the Department of Public Instruction, his calculations are correct.”
So, Larson’s math is solid. But there are some wrinkles as to how it is applied.
First, even if the Legislature had agreed to the Medicaid expansion, there’s no guarantee the money would have gone toward education – though, of course, Larson was creating his own hypothetical comparison.
DPI spokesperson Chris Bucher noted that Larson was making a “theoretical statement.”
“Generally, though, school districts receive aid from the state through a relatively complex formula based on enrollment information,” Bucher said in an email. “School districts are also limited in the amount of revenue they can raise by revenue limits. At the end of the day, though, Wisconsin is a local-control state and therefore it is up to individual school districts and school boards to determine budgeting and how much money goes toward hiring personnel and other areas.”
Our ruling
Larson said if the state expanded Medicaid, it could save the state $530 million, resulting in more than 3,200 teachers being hired, meaning roughly 7-8 teachers could be added to each school district.
Although his math is correct, funding from the state is complex and the school districts decide for themselves on how they want to spend the money.
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., who has led attempts to update immigration law, this month rejected a bill that would have given immigration officials more funding and changed how asylum is decided for people arriving at the U.S.’ southwest border.
Rubio justified his decision in a Feb. 11 CNN interview, saying the bill would have led to the hiring of bureaucrats who would easily let people into the country to give them work permits or asylum and a path to citizenship.
“The bill basically creates an asylum corps … thousands of bureaucrats, asylum agents that would be empowered right at the border to either allow people into the country with an immediate work permit,” Rubio said. “Or they have the power to immediately release them and grant them asylum.”
The bill, which failed in the Senate on a 49-50 vote, sought to hire more asylum officers. But Rubio omits that these officers are already part of the immigration system. Currently, they decide the cases of people who already live in the United States and are not in deportation proceedings.
The Senate bill wanted to enable these officials to also decide the cases of new southwest border arrivals who would have applied for asylum as a defense against deportation. Immigration experts questioned Rubio’s characterization that the bill would have made it easier for people to get asylum.
PolitiFact emailed Rubio’s press office for comments but did not hear back.
Although this bill is no longer being considered, asylum law and policies remain major contention points within Congress and in its negotiations with the Biden administration. So, here’s an analysis of the asylum provisions of this bill, which could influence future legislation.
Bill aimed to reduce asylum waiting periods
There’s a backlog of millions of asylum cases that immigration judges and asylum officers must decide. That amount of cases is pending largely because of the high numbers of people applying and the low number of resources available to adjudicate these applications.
The border bill sought to shorten the asylum decision process from years to six months and to expedite the issuing of work permits to eligible migrants. The bill also tried to make it harder to get asylum by raising the initial screening standard and adding new eligibility criteria (if people could move within their own home country to avoid persecution, they wouldn’t be eligible for asylum in the United States.)
Would the bill have created bureaucrats and an ‘asylum corps’?
The bill would have funded the hiring of thousands of new asylum officers who work for the executive branch, specifically the Department of Homeland Security.
But asylum officers have been deciding cases for a long time within DHS’ U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, said Kathleen Bush-Joseph, a Migration Policy Institute policy analyst. USCIS handles cases of people who are already in the United States, not necessarily people who are newly arriving at U.S. borders.
Rubio in 2013 co-sponsored a bill that would have enabled asylum officers “under certain circumstances” to grant asylum to people arriving at the border, according to the Congressional Research Service.
Immigration judges, who Rubio suggested he preferred, also are employed by the executive branch, specifically the Justice Department.
Both asylum officers and immigration judges receive extensive training on immigration laws, said Bush-Joseph.
What new powers did the bill try to give asylum officers?
Asylum officers would have had the power to decide the cases of people arriving at U.S. borders. This responsibility has rested only with immigration judges. Also, a newly created board of asylum officers would review case appeals. Currently, immigration courts and the Board of Immigration Appeals (a group of 23 appellate immigration judges within the Justice Department) have this responsibility.
Under the bill, people arriving at the border who seek asylum would have been released from custody and monitored remotely by immigration officials.
Asylum officers would then have had 90 days to interview them and to decide whether there is a “reasonable possibility” that the person is eligible for asylum. People who passed that initial interview could become eligible for work permits and be referred for another asylum interview.
Asylum officers would also have been able to conduct a second interview within 90 days. This is where immigration courts usually step in. The officers’ supervisors would review decisions to give people asylum after the second interview.
There would also be another way to get asylum. During the first interview, if people proved an even higher standard, that they had “clear and convincing evidence,” they would be granted asylum without a second interview. A supervisor would also review that decision.
People not interviewed within the first 90 days would remain in the asylum queue, but become eligible for work permits. (Democratic state and city leaders have asked the Biden administration to issue work permits faster so fewer migrants rely on government services.)
Did the bill make it easier to get asylum?
Rubio gave the impression that asylum officers would be more lenient and approve asylum more often than judges. Immigrant advocacy groups say the opposite.
The “rapid and truncated procedures will undermine the fairness and thoroughness of asylum screenings” the American Immigration Lawyers Association said in a Feb. 5 statement.
The bill made it harder for people to get asylum because immigration judges would not have the power to reverse asylum officers’ decisions, said the National Immigrant Justice Center.
Currently, when asylum officers deny a case, it is sent to immigration courts. In this venue, people may apply for asylum again to prevent their deportation.
Oftentimes, people who are denied asylum by asylum officers are granted asylum by immigration judges, said Bush-Joseph. She said this might be because by then people have had more time to find attorneys who “may be able to find more evidence or experts who can support their case.”
With immigration a top issue heading into the 2024 election, politicians have been speaking often about the challenges at the southern border.
The stunning collapse of a bipartisan border security bill after months of negotiations between Republicans and Democrats was the latest chapter in the national political saga.
The heated conversation over immigration often includes inaccuracies. For instance, a Politifact analysis in 2022 of a claim from U.S. Rep. Glenn Grothman found his representation of a border apprehensions statistic to be misleading.
To clear up common areas of confusion, we dived into the influx of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border, and how the country found itself in this position. Plus: what do policies such as asylum and Title 42 look like in practice?
Here’s a guide to help you understand the debate.
How many encounters with migrants did U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents have in the last fiscal year at the southern border?
Agents encountered migrants at the southern border about 2,476,000 times in the 2023 fiscal year, which ran from October 2022 through September 2023, according to CBP data.
That number includes people who tried to cross the border more than once. It also includes people who sought out border agents to claim asylum, and those who scheduled appointments to claim asylum at official ports of entry.
Encounters include both the cases where someone is apprehended or detained temporarily, then released into the U.S. with a future court date, and people who are turned away.
The peak month was September, when agents encountered migrants nearly 270,000 times.
But the 2024 fiscal year has even topped that number. In December, the most recent month with available data, agents encountered migrants over 302,000 times.
Poor economic conditions, violence and instability in migrants’ home countries often push them to leave, and the appeal of a better life in the U.S. prompts people to embark on dangerous journeys to cross the border.
Another reason for higher encounters is improved detection efforts by border agencies, according to a report from the National Immigration Forum, an advocacy group.
“As border security improves and becomes more effective, the total number of encounters are likely to rise as well,” the report said.
How do last year’s encounters at the southern border compare to prior years?
Customs and Border Protection data shows agents have encountered people more times in the 2023 fiscal year than in previous years.
In 2022, CBP recorded 2,379,000 encounters. In 2021, there were 1,735,000 encounters.
Now that Title 42 has ended, what happens to asylum seekers?
Under the pandemic-era Title 42, most migrants were sent back over the border and denied the right to seek asylum. U.S. officials turned away migrants more than 2.8 million times.
But there were no real consequences when someone illegally crossed the border. So migrants were able to try again and again to cross, on the off chance they would get into the U.S. That’s one of the common errors, equating encounters with actual people. Indeed, the more people turned away consistently, the more this measuring stick can balloon as they try a second, third or fourth time.
President Joe Biden ended Title 42 in May 2023. Now in place is Title 8, a set of longstanding immigration laws in the U.S. Code.
U.S. law states that people have a right to claim asylum if they arrive at a border and express a “well-grounded fear of persecution.”
Border agents give a brief screening to people who say they fear returning to their home country.
“If you say, ‘I have a fear of return,’ it triggers a protection under our laws that ensures that a government official will review your case to see if you are likely to be successful with qualifying for asylum in the U.S.,” said Erin Barbato, director of the Immigrant Justice Clinic at the University of Wisconsin.
If a migrant passes the initial screening, their case then goes to the immigration court system to determine if they can stay in the U.S., but that process can take years. Usually they are released into the U.S. to wait out their cases because Border Patrol stations don’t have the capacity to detain everyone.
These are generally “defensive asylum” cases, where people are placed in removal proceedings and must prove they should stay in the U.S. If an asylum seeker loses the case, they face deportation.
Asylum seekers with a court date have an incentive to go to their hearings because if they don’t show up, they will be ordered deported, Barbato said.
How long do migrants wait for asylum court hearings?
The asylum system is massively backlogged, with over 1.1 million pending cases. Petitioners are waiting an average of nearly four years, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC, at Syracuse University.
But going through process is not a sure way to stay in the U.S. About 50% of asylum claims in the last fiscal year were denied, according to TRAC data.
While they wait for their court dates, asylum seekers can apply for work permits.
What is parole and how is it being used?
One point of debate during border bill negotiations in the Senate was humanitarian parole. That is the president’s authority to allow migrants into the U.S. for special cases during emergencies or global unrest. It does not provide a path toward U.S. citizenship.
Biden’s administration has relied heavily on humanitarian parole. The U.S. airlifted nearly 80,000 Afghans and brought them to the U.S. after the Taliban takeover. The U.S. has admitted tens of thousands of Ukrainians who fled after the Russian invasion.
Last year the administration announced a plan to admit 30,000 people a month from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela via parole, provided those migrants had a financial sponsor and flew to the U.S. instead of going to the U.S.-Mexico border for entry.
Also being admitted into the U.S. through the parole authority: Migrants who make appointments through the CBP One phone app and are processed at official ports of entry.
What is the CBP One app?
The Biden administration wants more people to be processed at these official border crossings instead of crossing unlawfully between ports. So, the administration has tried to encourage migrants in Mexico to schedule appointments through the CBP One app.
There is an incentive for those who use the app and cross lawfully: a fast-track to legal work authorization.
Glitches and challenges with the app are well-documented. Many people try every morning to get an appointment in the lottery system. About 1,450 appointment slots are available each day.
CBS News reported that in the app’s first year, 450,000 migrants were allowed into the U.S. with the process. Migrants made more than 64.3 million requests to enter the country using the app, the outlet reported.
Those who do book an appointment have a brief meeting with a border agent and, if they pass certain safety checks, are released into the U.S. with a notice to appear in court at a certain date. They could go through the asylum process at a later point.
“Most people, after that interview, are allowed to live in the United States, but they are in deportation proceedings. So they receive that Notice to Appear, and they also have to have a sponsor in the U.S.,” Barbato said.
What are ‘got-aways,’ and how many are entering the U.S.?
Several Republican politicians have expressed concern about so-called “got-aways,” or people who crossed the border into the U.S. without being stopped by border agents.
It is difficult to know exactly how many people entered without being inspected, but the Department of Homeland Security creates an estimate based on models and observations. For example, an agent may see someone in the distance but can’t reach them, or a sensor or surveillance tool detects that someone is crossing.
The Congressional Budget Office used DHS officials’ public statements about got-aways to make its own estimate of 860,000 people in the 2023 fiscal year.
Republicans have argued that people who cross undetected pose a security threat. Laurence Benenson, vice president of policy and advocacy at the National Immigration Forum, agrees that the government can do better at getting control over the border, and that it’s important to know who is crossing into the country.
But Benenson also believes that most of the people who cross undetected are coming to the U.S. for the same reasons as those who encounter border agents.
“They come here for a better life, they come here to escape persecution, they come here to work and be with their families,” he said.
