Tag: General News

Is President Joe Biden the first U.S. president ever who will not detain immigrants in the U.S. illegally? That’s what Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said.

“Well, the realistic path forward if we want to end this crisis begins by Joe Biden reversing the executive orders that he made,” Rubio said March 3 on “Fox News Sunday.” 

“Every single one of them was designed to reverse a Trump policy. All those executive orders that are basically for the first time in American history we have a president who will not detain the people who enter this country illegally.”

PolitiFact contacted Rubio’s office to ask which executive orders he was referring to but received no reply. We found a January opinion article Rubio published in the Miami Herald where he referenced specific executive actions.

“Within days of his inauguration, President Biden placed a 100-day moratorium on deportations, halted construction of the border wall, dismantled Remain in Mexico and ended the Asylum Cooperative Agreements,” Rubio wrote. Rubio also noted that in 2022, Biden ended the use of Title 42, a pandemic-era policy that permitted rapid expulsions. That change, Rubio wrote, “signaled an unwillingness to deter cartels and coyotes, so more migrants headed north.” 

Immigration experts said Rubio mischaracterized Biden’s actions, ignoring the number of migrants detained and deported during Biden’s presidency and the actions of previous presidents. 

Since 1996, federal immigration law has generally required that people who enter the U.S. illegally be detained as they await court proceedings. However, because of lack of detention space, no administration has been able to detain every migrant.

“Every president in the last century has released some migrants who crossed the border,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy director at the American Immigration Council, an immigrant rights advocacy group.

Millions of migrant releases occurred under former Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump, Reichlin-Melnick said. By comparison, Biden released a lower percentage of migrants in his first two years in office than Trump did in his last two years, according to a November 2023 report by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.

“As of February, (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) had approximately 39,000 migrants in detention nationwide,” said Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, an associate policy analyst at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute.

Putzel-Kavanaugh said the U.S. doesn’t have enough detention space for the record number of migrants at the border. 

“It is the U.S. Congress that determines and funds the number of detention beds that ICE has at its disposal,” she said. “And while the administration can set priorities on who to detain, once ICE capacity is overwhelmed, immigration authorities must adjust priorities.”

We’ll examine each of the Biden actions Rubio highlighted.

100-day deportation moratorium

On Biden’s first day in office, the Department of Homeland Security published a memo pausing for 100 days the removal of certain people illegally in the U.S. Federal courts quickly banned the pause’s enforcement.

The memo specified that the pause meant to divert  resources to the border to carry out more expulsions and deportations of recent border crossers. People who posed a national security or public safety threat, or who entered the U.S. after Nov. 1, 2020, would be prioritized for expulsion.

The memo said it did not prohibit the apprehension or detention of anyone who wasn’t part of a priority category.

In September 2021, DHS released a second memo with similar guidelines for Immigration and Customs Enforcement to prioritize removing people who crossed the border in recent years or who threaten public safety. Courts also banned enforcement of those guidelines that year. They were reinstated in 2023 after a Supreme Court decision.

There were more than 3.6 million removals, returns and expulsions from February 2021, Biden’s first full month in office, to September 2023, based on Department of Homeland Security estimates.

Halted border wall construction

On his first day in office, Biden issued a proclamation terminating the national emergency Trump had used to divert Defense Department funding to build additional border barriers. However, in October 2023, the Biden administration resumed barrier construction using money Congress had previously appropriated. The Biden administration also has spent millions of dollars on barrier repairs.

Immigration experts have questioned barriers’ effectiveness at reducing illegal immigration and pointed out that the wall has been breached thousands of times. 

Dismantled ‘Remain in Mexico’

The Biden administration announced in January 2021 it would stop new enrollments in the Migrant Protection Protocols program, also known as “Remain in Mexico,” which sent certain people who arrived at the southern U.S. border back to Mexico to await asylum claim proceedings. 

The program was stopped and restarted several times because of court decisions until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June 2022 that it could be terminated. The program, which formally ended in October 2022, had enrolled 81,000 migrants.

But immigration experts said the program was effectively defunct by the time Biden took office and had been almost completely replaced by Title 42.

“Remain in Mexico was barely operational in January 2021 and Biden returned vastly more people to Mexico using Title 42 than were removed under Remain in Mexico,” said David Bier,  a Cato Institute immigration expert. “He then cooperated with the court order to restart and for several months in 2022 was returning more people than at any point in 2020.”

Ended the Asylum Cooperative Agreements

The Asylum Cooperative Agreements had already been suspended since March 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Biden officially terminated the agreements shortly after taking office. 

The agreements, signed with El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, allowed U.S. officials to deport people seeking asylum to these countries with certain conditions. But the U.S. had implemented only one of the agreements, with Guatemala, experts told us.

“Not a single person was subject to an (Asylum Cooperative Agreements) after March 20, 2020,” said Reichlin-Melnick, from the American Immigration Council.

Ending Title 42

Biden allowed Title 42 — a pandemic-era public health policy that prevented many migrants from applying for asylum and permitted rapid expulsions — to expire in May 2023. Bier said data shows that ending the program hasn’t increased migration, and instead increased security by reducing the number of “gotaways” who evade border patrol. 

The Department of Homeland Security replaced Title 42 “with a system of incentives for asylum seekers arriving at ports of entry and disincentives for those crossing between ports of entry without authorization, among other changes,” the Migration Policy Institute wrote in a January report.

Immigration experts also said the program was automatically terminated when the COVID-19 public health emergency expired. 

“It was not an immigration policy,”  Reichlin-Melnick said, “and Biden kept it around long past the point that anyone was seriously arguing that it was being used for public health reasons.”

Our ruling

Rubio said Biden’s executive orders meant “for the first time in American history we have a president who will not detain people who enter the country illegally.”

Rubio’s claim ignores detentions and deportations under Biden, and the millions of releases under previous presidents. Experts said the U.S. doesn’t have enough detention space for all migrants.

Experts said Rubio overstated the effects Biden’s executive actions had on illegal immigration. Some of the actions terminated already defunct or suspended programs; other actions were temporary or had questionable effect on migration numbers. 

The orders also didn’t prevent detention of migrants. As of February, ICE had about 39,000 migrants in detention nationwide, an expert said.

We rate Rubio’s claim False.

RELATED: As Chinese immigration to U.S. rises, Republicans and Trump use ‘military age men’ scare tactic 

PolitiFact Staff Writer Maria Ramirez Uribe contributed to this report.

In the U.S Senate race in Wisconsin, Republican challenger Eric Hovde has laid out an extensive case against Democratic U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, including her record on foreign policy. 

Among other things, he takes aim at Baldwin’s vote on the Iran nuclear deal, which he frames as support for terrorism. 

“Despite Iran’s long history of financing terrorism, my opponent Senator Baldwin was one of the staunchest supporters of the Iran deal which sent billions of dollars and plane loads of cash to Iran,” his campaign website says.

Did Baldwin support the Iran deal? And did it do what Hovde claims it did?

Yes. And not so much.

Baldwin did support Iran deal, but rest of claim falls short

We have addressed similar claims against Baldwin twice, so we are quite familiar with this line of attack. In both cases, we rated the claim Mostly False.

The first part, looking at how Baldwin voted on the deal, is the most straightforward part of the claim – and nothing about it is really in dispute. 

In 2015 Baldwin did vote with other Democrats against a Republican effort to block then-President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran. Republicans failed to get the 60 votes needed to block the deal.

Likewise, a 2020 report from the federal Bureau of Counterterrorism notes the U.S. has designated Iran a state sponsor of terrorism, including support of  “Hezbollah, Palestinian terrorist groups in Gaza, and various terrorist and militant groups in Iraq, Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East.”

When we asked Hovde’s campaign for backup, it included that link among many others – but none of the information provided really goes beyond what we have seen when we rated such claims in the past.

So, let’s turn to what we said in a June 29, 2018 fact-check. 

At the time, we were checking Republican Kevin Nicholson’s claim that the Iran deal “handed billions of dollars of cash on cargo planes, sent it to a state sponsor of terror, and Tammy Baldwin was one of the first U.S. senators to get on board and support that.” 

Nicholson was running in the GOP primary, but lost and Leah Vukmir went on to face Baldwin. In that item we noted:

The deal, struck in July 2015 under Obama, was with Iran, the United States, China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom and the European Union. It was aimed at making it harder for Iran to make a nuclear bomb. The deal restricted certain Iranian nuclear activities for periods between 10 to 25 years, and allowed for more intrusive, permanent monitoring. It also prohibited Iran from pursuing nuclear weapons in the future.

As part of the deal, Iran did get access to tens of billions of dollars in assets  — but the vast majority of those assets are Iran’s own money.

And what cash was delivered on a plane was far less than billions.

Let’s pause here, and apply that to what Hovde said. 

Hovde implies the money was simply given to Iran, or at least makes no mention of the context around it and the fact it was largely money Iran was owed. Worse, there is no mention of the fact it was a nuclear deal that called for Iran to halt work toward a nuclear weapon.

Former President Donald Trump undid the deal in 2018. 

Hovde’s spokesman, Ben Voelkel, also sent us a CNN story detailing how the U.S. sent a plane with $400 million to Iran on the day it released four American prisoners – which was also the day the nuclear deal was formally implemented.

This is what our earlier Nicholson fact-check said about that money and the apparent single plane (not the planes plural Hovde described):

• The deal released Iranian assets frozen under a variety of sanctions. The assets, cash in the bank, real estate or something else, belonged to Iran in the first place. The total value  — worldwide — of freed Iranian assets was about $56 billion, according to the U.S. Treasury Department.

• According to the U.S. State Department, Iran received about $1.7 billion from the United States  — $400 million plus interest. The payment was indirectly linked to the nuclear deal. The money was legally due to Iran. The country had paid America for military equipment in 1979, but the Iranian revolution came and the hardware was never delivered.

• Many news organizations reported the delivery of the $400 million in an unmarked cargo plane after American officials were certain that three Americans held in Iran were on their way home. It is not known how the remaining $1.3 billion made its way to Iran.

So, while Hovde started with an element of truth, his claim veered widely from there, just as past claims have.

Our ruling

Hovde said Baldwin “was one of the staunchest supporters of the Iran deal which sent billions of dollars and plane loads of cash to Iran.”

Baldwin said she voted for the deal because it was in the best interest of America’s security to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. Thirteen Democrats announced support before her.

Beyond that, the deal itself contained no provisions to send money to Iran. It did lift some sanctions, freeing up reserves already held by the country. As far as the plane load of cash, it was sent separately from the deal, to deliver money that was legally due to Iran. 

Our definition of Mostly False is a statement that “contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression.”

As with the earlier fact checks, that fits here.