Donald Trump speaks at the Hyatt Regency on Capitol Hill on November 13, 2024
(Pool/Getty)

‘That is not true’: Trump’s claim about American citizenship is wildly incorrect

According to fact checkers, Donald Trump is spreading a lie about American citizen citizenship – adding to his ongoing tally of falsehoods that numbers in the tens of thousands already.

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In an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, Trump touted his “mass deportation” plan to forcibly remove millions of undocumented migrants from U.S. soil. In order to add legitimacy to his plans, Trump bent the facts surrounding the details of American citizenship. Namely, that the U.S. is the “only country that has” birthright citizenship – which makes person born on U.S. soil an American citizen.

Fact checkers at Aljazeera stress that this is a lie. More than 30 other countries have birthright citizenship, including Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Canada. The United States and Canada are the only so-called “developed” nations that have birthright laws. “You know, if somebody sets a foot, just a foot, one foot, you don’t need two, on land, congratulations, you are now a citizen of the United States of America,” Trump continued. If the treatment of immigrants who cross United States’ southern border is to be considered, this statement outrageously untrue.

Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t Trump’s only lie surrounding immigration. Trump also said that “within the three-year period… during the Biden term” U.S. allowed 13,099 murderers into the country. According to a letter released by ICE, there are 13,099 migrants convicted of murder living outside of immigrant detention in the U.S. However, the number of these noncitizens represents a tally collected over the last 40 years, including the years Trump was president. Many of these people are not roaming free, as Trump implies, but are rather imprisoned in U.S. penitentiaries that are not immigrant detention centers.

Trump’s lies around migrants with criminal convictions were said in service to a greater lie, one that he has spent the majority of his 2024 presidential campaign spreading. In his interview with NBC, Trump repeated the widely discredited falsehood that “crime is at an all time high.” According to the FBI, it isn’t. Aljazeera reports that the FBI has measured crime to be “about half as high as it was in the early 1990’s.” Trump’s “high crime” statements are made to further radicalize and enflame his base against migrants living on U.S. soil. Throughout his campaign, Trump and his allies have spread outrageous lies surrounding immigrants, including the patently ridiculous claims that some were eating house pets. Trump has compounded upon his lies with increasingly xenophobic rhetoric surrounding immigrants, at one point saying that migrants were “poisoning the blood” of the nation, a phrase that ghoulishly echoes “blood purity” beliefs held by white supremacists and Nazis.

While Trump has suggested that he may try to spare Dreamers – people brought to the U.S. as minors – from deportation, it’s unclear if he will make good on those claims. According to Trump, he intends to seek out migrants with criminal convictions to be the first targets for deportation. However, Trump has suggested that he will pursue migrants at all costs, even at the cost of the nation’s economy. Given Trump’s penchant for the untruths, it’s unwise to take promises of mercy that the president-elect makes seriously.




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