Category: Fact Check

Dozens of Facebook posts are drawing attention as accounts urge people to help identify “a young woman who was involved in a hit and run incident, and left for dead by the side of the road.”

Which road? Depends which post you’re looking at. 

One post, from April 29, says “Fulton Co.” Another says “Fort Worth.” A third says “Beaumont,” a fourth says “Kingston, NY,” and so on. By May 1, these posts had been deleted, but more have popped up claiming the woman was left on a road in “Suwanee” and “Holland.”

But they all use the same photos, including one of a woman in a hospital bed, and claim she “is currently in a coma” and that “deputies are unable to identify her because she is missing her ID.”

These 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.)

Two of the post’s photos came from a December 2023 news story about an Abilene, Texas, woman who was “hit by a car while she was crossing the street with her little girl and dog,” a CBS News affiliate reported. The woman was hospitalized with injuries that “did not appear to be life-threatening,” and the girl and dog were uninjured.

The photo of a woman in a hospital bed, meanwhile, was taken from an August 2023 news story about Erin Stevenson, who was injured while playing with her dog in Chicago. Her dog headbutted her, The Mirror U.S. reported, and she was put on life support for several days but survived. 

We rate posts claiming these photos show an unidentified woman and the scene of her hit-and-run False.

With the economy consistently important to potential 2024 voters, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., compared the job-creation records of President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump during a recent interview with MSNBC’s Katy Tur.

Pelosi said April 29 that Trump “has the worst record of job loss of any president.”

Tur responded that “there was a global pandemic,” meaning that Trump’s job creation figures suffered from the coronavirus pandemic that emerged during his term’s final year.

Pelosi responded, “He had the worst record of any president. … If you want to be an apologist for Donald Trump, that may be your role. But it ain’t mine.”

Coverage of the moment focused on Pelosi calling Tur a Trump “apologist,” which Tur rejected. We wanted to fact-check the claim, which we’ve heard before from Biden.

It’s common for presidents and their allies to assign the incumbent too much credit for good economic results on their watch, and for opponents of the president to assign too much blame to the incumbent for weak results. Such assertions are usually fraught, because presidents are one factor — but hardly the only one — in determining how well the economy performs. 

Like Biden’s earlier claim, Pelosi both overlooks some technical history and also overplays Trump’s role over the U.S. economy — which included the once-in-a-century pandemic disruption.

To calculate the change in jobs on a president’s watch, economists turn to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  

During Trump’s presidency, the U.S. lost a net 2.7 million jobs.

In comparison, every president since Harry Truman (who served from 1945 to 1953) has gained jobs during his tenure. Bill Clinton, who left office in 2001, oversaw the biggest gain at nearly 23 million, and George W. Bush, who left office in 2009, saw the smallest gain at almost 1.4 million.

The federal government didn’t keep comparable statistics during Hoover’s term (1929 to 1933) or through much of the tenure of his successor, Franklin Roosevelt. But experts say it’s certain the Great Depression would have caused a net loss of jobs under Hoover and the recovery would have produced a net gain of jobs under Roosevelt.

At its peak in 1933, 24.9% of the workforce was unemployed, a figure that didn’t include farm workers, who were hit at least as hard as other workers during the Dust Bowl era. Under Trump, the unemployment rate peaked briefly at 14.8% but fell back to half that within about five months. 

Pelosi said Trump had the worst jobs record of “any president.” Hoover almost certainly fared worse, and we don’t know about earlier presidents, who served before reliable records were kept. 

When looking at job creation patterns under a president, timing matters. A lot.

Before the pandemic, Trump oversaw a 4.6% employment increase. That trails the rise during the equivalent time period for Biden (about 10%) and Bill Clinton (about 8.1%), but it’s more than the stagnation or shrinkage under George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

Efforts to restrain the virus’s spread sparked major cutbacks in hospitality, entertainment and restaurants, and in just one month, the unemployment rate more than tripled to a post-World War II record of 14.8%.

The pandemic wiped out the first three years of job gains under Trump. Almost 58% of the lost jobs were back by the time Trump left office in January 2021, but his 2020 loss to Biden meant he didn’t get the chance to regain the rest.

Pelosi’s office acknowledged that she should have referred to Hoover’s record, but a spokesperson argued that Trump played a role in worsening the pandemic.

Economists have told PolitiFact that providing a pandemic asterisk to Trump’s data is merited.

“Trump certainly could have responded better to it, but it was a worldwide phenomenon, not of his making,” Dean Baker, an economist at the liberal Center for Economic and Policy Research, told PolitiFact in January.

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the right-of-center American Action Forum, agreed that the pandemic was “not comparable” with earlier examples of economic shocks, such as those caused by wars or oil shortages. 

“No policy could have stopped the job losses early in the pandemic,” he told PolitiFact in January.

Our ruling

Pelosi said Trump has “the worst record of job loss of any president.” 

Trump is the first president in almost a century to see employment decline between his first and last days in office. 

However, experts widely agree that Hoover, the president during the Great Depression, also saw jobs lost on his watch — likely more than Trump, given the severity of the Depression — and it’s possible that earlier presidents who served before standardized employment data was collected did, too.

And even though Tur raised it, Pelosi omitted the primary reason for the employment decline under Trump — the pandemic. 

Presidents are often assigned too much credit for good economic results on their watch and too much blame for poor economic results; in reality, presidential policies are but one factor among many in determining how well the economy performs. 

We rate the statement Half True.

A recent Facebook post warns of likely government lockdowns starting in a matter of weeks. The source? Supposedly, a short-term housing rental company. 

“BREAKING: AirBnB is expecting large-scale government actions and lockdowns to begin on June 6, 2024, according to a newly obtained email,” reads an April 26 X post shared on Facebook. 

The post includes a screenshot of what looks like an email that says: “We’re updating our extenuating circumstances policy and changing its name to make it easier to understand. The revised major disruptive events policy will apply to all trips and experiences taking place on or after June 6, 2024, regardless of when they were booked. What’s changing in the policy? Foreseeable weather events at the reservation’s location are explicitly eligible for coverage if they result in another covered event, such as a government travel restriction or large-scale utility outage.” 

What it doesn’t say: that Airbnb is expecting a large-scale government lockdown starting June 6.

This 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.)

The company posted about its updated policy March 28, noting that it “provides cancellation and refund support for our guests when unexpected major events like natural disasters, government travel restrictions or weather events impact their ability to stay at a location.”

The policy, also posted on Airbnb’s website, explains “government travel restrictions” as “mandatory travel restrictions imposed by a governmental agency, such as an evacuation order,” which is common with weather events such as hurricanes. 

Other events include declared public health emergencies and epidemics, military actions and other hostilities, and large-scale outages of essential utilities (“prolonged outages of essential utilities, such as heat, water and electricity, impacting the vast majority of homes in a given location”).

Airbnb told PolitiFact in a statement that the claims in the post are “entirely false.” 

We rate the claim that “Airbnb is expecting large-scale government actions and lockdowns to begin on June 6, 2024, according to a newly obtained email” False. 

Former President Donald Trump at May 1 rallies in Wisconsin and Michigan — battleground states with high numbers of manufacturing jobs — highlighted his vision for the economy.

Trump made misleading statements about tax cuts and jobs filled by immigrants in the U.S. illegally, but spoke more accurately on the rising costs of food, including chicken.

Thronged by thousands of his supporters, Trump told jokes and attacked President Joe Biden’s demeanor and record on jobs and the economy. Trump’s appearance was a marked departure from the Manhattan courtroom, where he has been required to sit silently for hourslong stretches during the first of up to four criminal trials. 

“When I’m in the White House, the Biden economic bust will quickly be replaced with the Trump economic boom,” Trump said in Waukesha, Wisconsin.

Here are our fact-checks of his statements on the economy, which voters often tell pollsters is their top concern.

“The people that benefited the most (from the tax cuts Trump signed) are lower-income people,” and Biden “wants them to expire.”  

The first part of this statement is wrong; the second is misleading.

The part about low-income taxpayers benefiting more “is not correct,” based on modeling from the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center and other think tanks, said John Buhl, the Tax Policy Center’s communications director.

The Tax Policy Center analysis found that the Trump-signed legislation would, on average, cut taxes for households in each income group, but that taxpayers in higher-income households would see the biggest benefits.

For instance, the lowest one-fifth of taxpayers — people earning up to $25,000 — would see their average federal tax rate drop by 0.4 percentage points in 2018. The drop in tax rate would be larger for each successive one-fifth of the income spectrum, with the top one-fifth seeing its tax rates drop by 1.8 percentage points. The biggest gains would go to households in the top 1% to 5% of incomes (from $307,900 to $732,000); their tax rates would drop by 3.1 percentage points. 

The numbers were similar for changes through 2025, the Tax Policy Center found.

On whether Biden wants to get rid of the tax cuts, Trump appeared to refer to brief remarks Biden made about the Trump tax cuts in April, when he said, “It’s going to expire. And if I’m reelected, it’s going to stay expired.”

However, Biden has said repeatedly that he will not raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000, a promise he campaigned on in 2020. The White House told PolitiFact that Biden would let the Trump tax cuts expire for wealthier taxpayers but would not let Americans making less than $400,000 see any tax increase. 

“A lot of the numbers … that just came out on immigration and unemployment (showed that) all of the numbers were from illegal immigrants.”

There are significant problems with this statement. 

The employment of foreign-born workers is relatively small — in 2023, foreign-born workers accounted for just less than 20% of all workers — but the count has been growing for years, especially since the pandemic.

The federal government counts the data for foreign-born and native-born employment using a survey of households. From month to month, the data tends to whipsaw because the survey has a sizable margin of error.

Looking at just the most recent month-to-month changes, as Trump said he was doing, the increase in native-born employment (929,000) from February 2024 to March 2024 was more than eight times larger than the increase in foreign-born employment (112,000) over the same period. Those numbers contradict what Trump said.

To iron out the data, we previously looked at a longer period: Biden’s presidency. From February 2021 to February 2024, native-born employment rose by almost 5.7 million workers. That was a larger increase than the 5.1 million for foreign-born workers. So, the increase in foreign-born workers was substantial, and disproportionate to their share of the overall labor force, but it was not “all,” as Trump said.

Trump is also off base in saying the entire increase in employment came from “illegal immigrants.” The statistics for the foreign-born workforce are much broader than “illegal immigrants” or recent migrants. They also include many people who immigrated to the U.S. legally and have been U.S. citizens for decades and people here as legal permanent residents, or green card holders.

Under Biden, “chicken — I love chicken — is up 24%. Baby food is up 30%. Eggs are up 59%. Gasoline is up 50%. … Airfares are up 33%”

Trump is pretty close with most of the price increases he cited.

During the same period, wages rose by almost 16%, so the costs of each of these items rose faster than wages.

The most misleading of Trump’s price statistics is airline fares. Airline fares are 27% higher now than they were when Biden took office. But Biden became president when the pandemic had dampened demand for interstate travel, so the January 2021 prices were artificially low by historical standards.

Airfares are cheap by historical standards. The current price level for airline tickets is almost identical to where it was during Trump’s tenure, and it’s mostly lower than it was for most of Barack Obama’s presidency. Having airfares lower than they were in the early-to-mid 2010s means that prices have eased rather than risen.

“And I already gave you the largest tax cut in the history of our country, larger than the Reagan tax cuts many years ago. You got the largest tax cuts in history.”

This is a falsehood Trump shared repeatedly during his presidency. (Our colleagues at the Washington Post Fact Checker found that this was Trump’s second-most-commonly repeated false claim, shared 295 times during his presidency.)

In inflation-adjusted dollars, the tax bill Trump signed was the fourth-largest since 1940, and as a percentage of GDP, it ranked seventh.

“GDP growth was plunging by more than 50% in the first quarter of this year.”

Trump is right on the numbers. However, to the layperson, his framing might make this drop sound more alarming than it is.

In 2023’s fourth quarter, gross domestic product rose by 3.4% on an annualized basis. In 2024’s first quarter, it rose by 1.6%. 

But GDP itself did not plunge by 50%; that would have represented a massive economic calamity. GDP continued to grow, but half as fast as it did in the previous quarter. Also, it had further to fall in 2024’s first quarter: The 3.4% growth in the previous quarter represented the second-fastest-growing quarter since the start of 2022.

The U.S. is experiencing “record kinds of inflation.”

Although inflation is still considered an economic problem for the U.S., the overall rate is nowhere near a record.

The highest inflation rates were recorded in the 1970s and early 1980s, when the annual price increase sometimes hovered between 12% and 15%. The highest rate on Biden’s watch was around 9% in summer 2022. That was the highest monthly figure in about four decades, but not the highest ever.

Inflation was 3.5% in March 2024, the most recent month available. The Federal Reserve believes that’s still too high to start lowering interest rates — the Fed wants to see sustained inflation rates closer to 2% — but the current level is still about two-thirds lower than its 2022 peak.

“By 2030 (Biden) wants everyone to have an electric vehicle.” 

This is an exaggeration.

The Biden administration set a goal — not a mandate — to have electric vehicles comprise half of all new vehicle sales by 2030. It’s currently at about 8%.

In March, the administration finalized a rule that projects 30% to 56% of new light-duty vehicles will be battery-electric by 2032. That means that consumers could still buy some gasoline- powered cars, both new and used, by 2032, or hybrids.

“There is no federal requirement that any particular percentage of an automaker’s fleet needs to be electric,” Jeremy Michalek, director of the Carnegie Mellon Vehicle Electrification Group, said. “Our recent work suggests that consumers haven’t really changed what they value, but as EV technology gets better, with lower cost and larger range, those same consumers choose EVs more often.”

AutoForecast Solutions LLC projects sales of new battery-electric vehicles in the United States will be about 31% by 2031. 

There are several challenges to expanding the EV market including the cost to purchase a car, the range the cars can go, the relative lack of charging stations compared with gas stations and the costs of raw materials for building the cars, said Joseph McCabe, president and chief executive officer of AutoForecast Solutions, a car industry trend forecaster.

RELATED: All of our fact-checks of Donald Trump

RELATED: All of our fact-checks of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris

Florida taxpayers are spending millions of dollars to cover the health care costs of people in the U.S. illegally, Rep. Greg Steube, R-Fla., said on X.

Immigrants in the country illegally cost “Florida taxpayers $566 million for 54,000 hospital visits,” Steube said in an April 14 post. “Biden’s open border policies make every state a border state, burdening taxpayers with the costs of non-citizen healthcare.” 

Is Steube right about that cost in Florida?

Steube’s office said his number comes from Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration. In March the agency issued two reports, one for state legislators and one for the public, detailing the “Cost of Uncompensated Care for Illegal Immigrants.” The legislative report included more analysis and caveats than the public report.

The agency said in a press release that hospital admissions and emergency visits data collected from June to December 2023 showed that in Florida, care provided to people in the country illegally cost more than $566 million. But that doesn’t mean taxpayers paid that entire amount.

The agency’s legislative report said it’s unclear how much of the $566 million was uncompensated.

People in the country illegally can have private insurance or pay for their health care out of pocket. Some also pay taxes, and therefore would be among the taxpayers covering the costs. 

“Rep. Steube is vehemently opposed to illegal immigration and any strain it wrongly places on taxpaying American citizens,” Sadie Thorman, Steube’s communications director, told PolitiFact. 

Overview of the Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration’s reports

Gov. Ron DeSantis in May 2023 signed into law a bill requiring Florida’s Medicaid-accepting hospitals to ask patients their immigration status. Patients do not have to answer. (About 7% did not answer for the time period covered in the report.)

The law tasked Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration with an annual report on the total number of hospital and emergency department admissions of people who are in the country lawfully and unlawfully. The report also had to include the costs of uncompensated care for immigrants in the country illegally — how much of their care wasn’t covered by Medicare, Medicaid, private insurance or self-pay.

The agency’s reports said that from June 2023 to December 2023, 0.82% of patients who responded said they were in the U.S. illegally. The agency multiplied that 0.82% by $69 billion — which represents the state’s hospitals total expenditures in 2022, and concluded that Florida provided $566 million in care to immigrants unlawfully in the U.S. 

We reached out to Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration for more information but did not get a response.

The Florida Policy Institute, a center-left think tank, said that the $566 million is inflated.

The state agency’s report was designed to “estimate how much immigrants cost the state, particularly in uncompensated care,” Alexis Tsoukalas, Florida Policy Institute policy analyst told PolitiFact. Therefore, the state agency should have focused on hospitals’ uncompensated care costs, not total expenses, she said.

Operating expenses include fixed categories, such as rent, that are not affected by patients’ citizenship status, the Florida Policy Institute’s report said.

A “more measured estimate” would be $21.3 million, the institute said, even though that still doesn’t account for care that was paid out of pocket or through private insurance. To reach this figure, the Florida Policy Institute multiplied the 0.82% of patients who said they were in the U.S. illegally by the total cost of uncompensated care provided by Florida hospitals in 2022 — $2.6 billion. 

Caveats to calculating health care cost for immigrants in the U.S. illegally 

Health care experts told PolitiFact that claiming taxpayers had to cover $566 million of care expenses figures that immigrants in the U.S. illegally didn’t pay for any part of their care via private insurance or self-pay. 

Immigrants in the U.S. illegally are ineligible for federally funded programs such as Medicare, but they can have private insurance through employers or can pay for care out of pocket. 

Steube’s claim also figures that all uncompensated care for Florida’s immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally falls entirely on the state’s taxpayers. In emergency cases, hospitals must provide care despite a patient’s insurance coverage or immigration status. That care is covered by federal and state programs. 

In fiscal year 2022 (October 2021 to September 2022), Florida reported to the federal government that it spent $170 million in emergency care for immigrants in the U.S. illegally. The federal government covered $114 million.

When people pay federal and state taxes, those funds help cover the uncompensated care. But many immigrants in the U.S. illegally are among these taxpayers. In Florida, they paid $37 billion in federal, state and local taxes in 2021, according to the latest data available from the American Immigration Council, an immigrant-rights advocacy group.

Several studies have found that immigrants in the U.S. illegally overall give more to the health care system than they take. Their tax payments help fund Medicare, for example, but they are ineligible for it.

Many of the immigrants who enter the U.S. illegally are young and healthy, so they don’t often seek health care services, a 2022 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association said. The study also said immigrants in the country illegally are less likely to go seek medical services because they don’t always speak English or understand the U.S. health care system.

In its legislative report, the Florida agency said it found no correlation between the amount of uncompensated care at a hospital and the share of immigrants in the U.S. illegally it served. High levels of uncompensated care were associated more with rural hospitals than patients’ immigration status. 

Our ruling

Steube said  immigrants in the country illegally cost “Florida taxpayers $566 million for 54,000 hospital visits.”

Steube’s claim contains an element of truth, a Florida agency said hospitals provided $566 million in health care to immigrants in the U.S. illegally. 

But his statement also ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. The agency said it’s unclear how much of the $566 million was uncompensated. It’s possible that some of this cost was covered by migrants who paid for their care out of pocket or via private insurance. Steube’s claim also omits that some immigrants are among the taxpayers helping cover these expenses. And, some experts say that the agency’s methodology — calculating the operating costs instead of uncompensated costs — may have inflated the estimate.

Although it’s difficult to say how much precisely the care of immigrants in the country illegally cost Florida taxpayers, Steube’s presentation of the agency’s figures is misleading.

We rate it Mostly False.

Is a billionaire bankrolling student protests at universities across the country?  

“We all knew it but now it’s confirmed … ” read one April 26 Facebook post that shared a screengrab of a New York Post headline and linked to a story. The Facebook post also included the New York Post article’s first sentence: “George Soros and his hard-left acolytes are paying agitators who are fueling the explosion of radical anti-Israel protests at colleges across the country.”

The Facebook post and a similar one 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.)

Soros, a billionaire, philanthropist and Democratic campaign contributor, is a Jewish Hungarian Holocaust survivor who is often a target of antisemitic conspiracy theories.

Criticism of Soros’ politics or how he spends his wealth is not inherently antisemitic, but “when Soros is used as a symbol for Jewish control, wealth, and power, the criticism may be an updated version of traditional antisemitic tropes,” according to the American Jewish Committee, a Jewish advocacy organization headed by former U.S. Rep. Ted Deutch. 

“Unfortunately, the idea that rich Jews use their money for malevolent purposes, including to undermine society, has been a staple of antisemitic myth for centuries,” said Aryeh Tuchman, director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism.  

Data from the social analytics company NewsWhip showed that U.S. Reps. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., and Beth Van Duyne, R-Texas, amplified the New York Post story on Facebook. On X, the story was shared April 26 by conservatives including Arizona Republican senate candidate Kari Lake. 

During an April 28 Fox News appearance, lawyer Alan Dershowitz, said, “There’s no question” that organizations funded by Soros helped finance the protests.

(Internet Archive)

We learned that Soros’ grant-making organization, Open Society Foundations, has awarded grants to some groups the New York Post article linked to the demonstrations. But the connections between Soros’ money and specific campus protesters involved several degrees of separation.

Soros’ Open Society Foundations describes itself as providing funding for groups “working for justice, democratic governance, and human rights.” In May 2020, some conservatives claimed the organization was “funding” Black Lives Matter protests in Minneapolis, which we rated False. Soros also has been at the center of false claims that he financially supported the first national Women’s March and organized the Charlottesville, Va., protests and counterprotests in 2017. 

Open Society Foundations responded to the article with an April 26 X post, writing that the Post “continues its practice of mixing distortion and unsubstantiated insinuations.”

The X post continued, “We have a long history of fighting antisemitism, Islamophobia, and all forms of racism and hate, and have advocated for the rights of Palestinians and Israelis and for peaceful resolution to the conflict in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.” It also said the foundation’s funding is publicly disclosed on its website. 

We contacted the New York Post for comment by email and received no response. 

Is Soros paying protesters who are US Campaign for Palestinian Rights fellows?

The New York Post’s April 26 article said three people who were fellows at the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, a pro-Palestinian advocacy group, which received an Open Society Foundations grant, are involved in the current protests.

However, those three people were fellows in 2023, not this year.

Open Society Foundations’ website says it has awarded grants to the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights. The organization, known to the IRS as “Education for Just Peace in the Middle East,” received:

• A $300,000 two-year grant in 2018. 

• A $150,000 one-year grant in 2021. 

• A $250,000 two-year grant in 2022.

The Post reported that a program within the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, called Youth Fellows, had three fellows — Nidaa Lafi, Craig Birckhead-Morton and Malak Afaneh — who “have been major figures in the nationwide protest movement.” 

Cat Knarr, a US Campaign for Palestinian Rights spokesperson, said Lafi, Birckhead-Morton and Afaneh were fellows in 2023, not 2024. 

Knarr also said that “no one donor specifically funds our fellows program,” and most of the grants from Soros’ group, including the current grant that runs through June 2024, have been “for general operating support.”

Student protesters gather inside their encampment on the Columbia University campus on April 29, 2024, in New York. (AP)

Claims of indirect payments denied by organizations 

The New York Post cited other groups that it said have received Open Society Foundations money and are funneling it to smaller groups, such as Jewish Voice for Peace, an advocacy group that describes itself as “U.S. Jews (in) solidarity with the Palestinian freedom struggle.” The Post said that Jewish Voice for Peace received $650,000 from the Tides Foundation, an Open Society Foundations grant awardee, between 2017 and 2022.

However, the Tides Foundation told PolitiFact that Open Source Foundations had not provided funding to Jewish Voice for Peace through the accounts it oversees. 

Open Society Foundations reported that since 2017 it had directly awarded Jewish Voice for Peace grants totaling $875,000 from 2017 to 2022. The 18-month grant awarded in 2022 was “to educate the public about movement building across the United States,” according to Open Society Foundations’ website. 

The Post also said Soros had donated $132,000 to the Westchester People’s Action Coalition Foundation, or WESPAC Foundation, a group the newspaper called “a major funder of anti-Israel groups, including Within Our Lifetime and Students for Justice in Palestine.”

Searches of the Open Society Foundations’ online Awarded Grants database  for “Westchester People’s Action Coalition Foundation,” “WESPAC Foundation,” “Students for Justice in Palestine,” and “Within Our Lifetime” returned no results. 

An Open Society Foundations’ spokesperson told PolitiFact he has never heard of the Westchester People’s Action Coalition Foundation.

Nada Khader, a WESPAC Foundation spokesperson, said the organization hasn’t received Open Society Foundations funding. Khader said the foundation serves as a fiscal sponsor for, but does not fund, Within Our Lifetime and Students for Justice in Palestine. That means it receives donations for and makes payments on behalf of the groups. 

A Students for Justice in Palestine spokesperson told The Washington Post that the WESPAC Foundation “neither funds nor influences our organization’s political activity but instead extends its legal tax-exempt status to us in order to support our mission.”

Representatives at two colleges cited by the New York Post as having paid protesters told PolitiFact it isn’t true.

“We have no information whatsoever that suggests the ANY of (t)he claims you have heard hold true on the Berkeley campus,” said Dan Mogulof, a University of California, Berkeley spokesperson, referring to claims that Soros is paying students to protest or that outside backers have funded or organized the protests.

And a spokesperson for Yale’s coalition of student protesters said none of the college’s campus protesters were paid for their organizing work by Soros or any other source.

PolitiFact Researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.

RELATED: No, George Soros and his foundations do not pay people to protest

On the same day Florida’s six-week abortion ban took effect, Vice President Kamala Harris visited Jacksonville to blast the law and blame one person: Florida resident and former President Donald Trump.

Harris said the Florida ban prohibits abortions before most women know they are pregnant. Then she singled out Trump, citing recent remarks in a Time magazine about his stance on policies including reproductive health.

“Just this week in an interview, (Trump) said states have the right to monitor pregnant women to enforce these bans and states have the right to punish pregnant women for seeking out abortion care,” Harris told campaign supporters.

Her phrasing could make it sound as though Trump spoke in support of the states taking those actions. Rather, he acknowledged that states have the right to do this but would not share his opinion on whether they should.

On April 30, Time published the transcripts of two interviews with Trump with the online rollout of its cover story about his vision for a second term in office. Reporter Eric Cortellessa interviewed Trump twice in April, once at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s West Palm Beach estate, and once by phone.

Cortellessa pressed Trump for details about his somewhat murky abortion position, including whether he would veto federal abortion restrictions or a bill that grants full legal rights to embryos. Trump’s answers consistently deferred to the states. (Trump also wouldn’t say how he planned to vote on Florida’s ballot amendment that would allow abortions to the point of fetal viability.)

Then, Cortellessa asked, “Do you think states should monitor women’s pregnancies so they can know if they’ve gotten an abortion after the ban?”

Trump replied, “I think they might do that. Again, you’ll have to speak to the individual states.” 

As Trump began talking about Roe v. Wade, the legal precedent that allowed federal abortion access until the U.S. Supreme Court overturned it in 2022, Cortellessa jumped in, mentioning states prosecuting women who received illegal abortions and asking Trump if he was comfortable with that.

Trump said his comfort was irrelevant. Here’s the transcript:

Cortellessa: “States will decide if they’re comfortable or not — ” 

Trump: “Yeah the states — “

Cortellessa: “Prosecuting women for getting abortions after the ban. But are you comfortable with it?” 

Trump: “The states are going to say. It’s irrelevant whether I’m comfortable or not. It’s totally irrelevant, because the states are going to make those decisions. And by the way, Texas is going to be different than Ohio. And Ohio is going to be different than Michigan. I see what’s happening.”

Cortellessa gave Trump’s abortion comments prominence within the Time story, characterizing them by saying Trump “would let red states monitor women’s pregnancies and prosecute those who violate abortion bans.” He later wrote that Trump said policies such as monitoring women’s pregnancies and prosecuting them for illegal abortions should be left to the individual states.

Brian Fallon, a communications director for the Biden-Harris campaign, told PolitiFact that Trump’s answers may have avoided a direct call for states to monitor pregnant women, but “clearly means he thinks individual states are within their rights to do so.”

Likewise, Fallon said, on punishing women, Trump’s deferment to states “means he believes it is in their power to make the decision to punish women if they wish.”

In recent legislative sessions, lawmakers in states such as Texas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Kansas and South Carolina have offered bills that could potentially allow the prosecution of women who undergo abortions. None has advanced far; Republican leaders have often come out against them as too extreme. PolitiFact was unable to find any bills introduced so far that would require monitoring of pregnancies to prevent abortions.

President Joe Biden and Harris have long said that Trump supports punishing women for getting abortions, a claim we previously rated Mostly False. In a 2016 MSNBC town hall, host Chris Matthews asked about penalties for abortion, and Trump said there has to be “some form of punishment” for women. But Trump retracted the comment that same day, amid criticism, and issued a statement that said he meant that physicians should be held legally responsible, not women.

Our ruling

Harris said that “just this week in an interview, (Trump) said states have the right to monitor pregnant women to enforce these bans, and states have the right to punish pregnant women for seeking out abortion care.”

Trump’s comments allowed for that possibility, though he wasn’t that explicit about whether he thought they should. Trump told a Time reporter that the reporter would need to ask the states “because the states are going to say.” 

Harris’ statement is accurate but needs clarification. We rate it Mostly True.

RELATED: Donald Trump said all legal scholars, ‘on both sides,’ wanted Roe v. Wade overturned. That’s wrong.

The devil’s in the details, but not on this Time magazine cover. 

On April 30, the 100-year-old magazine known for its iconic covers released its latest: a seated black-and-white image of former President Donald Trump with a three-word title, “If He Wins.” 

But a subtly edited photo began circulating online that made a fiendish suggestion. “They gave President Trump devil horns” posted a user on X alongside an image of the Time cover that featured the tops of the “M” in “TIME” emerging like two red horns from the back of Trump’s head. 

(Screenshot of X post)

But this is not the original cover, it was altered. 

On the May 27 print issue’s actual cover, Trump’s head covers only the bottom left corner of the “M,” and does not evoke hellish parallels.

(Source: Time magazine)

The edited photo, shared April 30 by conservative influencer Dom Lucre, makes the figure of Trump slightly larger so that his head covers most of the “M,” and only the top points of the famous red “TIME” logo poke out from the former president’s head. 

Time did not give Trump devil horns on its latest magazine cover. Because the image was manipulated, we rate the claim, appropriately, Pants on Fire! 

U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., didn’t say the moon is more useful than the sun, and neither did U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. 

But the New York Democrat is credited with the quote in a recent Facebook post. 

“The moon is more important than the sun as the moon gives us light at night when it is dark out. The sun only gives us light during the day when it is already light out,” reads quoted text overlaying a photo of Ocasio-Cortez. 

This 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.)

We found no evidence that Ocasio-Cortez said this. It doesn’t appear in her social media channels or press releases.  We also found no news coverage attributing the statement to the representative. 

In January, Snopes fact-checked a claim that Boebert made a similar statement (she didn’t), and found that such a sentiment has circulated for at least a century. In 1875, a British newspaper attributed it to “an Irishman.”

We rate claims Ocasio-Cortez said this False.