On his way to Camp David this morning, Trump falsely claimed that immigrants illegally in our country have murdered thousands of U.S. citizens since 2000.
This is a bald-faced lie. But you knew that already.
Right before Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo began on Fox News, they aired Trump's comments to the White House press pool as he was getting ready to leave for Camp David. Trump used the murder of California policeman Ronil Singh as a calling card to demand his wall be built and then veered off into conspiracy land.
Trump said, "If you go back to the year 2000, we have thousands of people that are killed by illegal immigration, by people coming into the country illegally and killing our citizens."
Back on June 18th, at the White House, Trump uttered this same lie, only he alleged that 63K was murdered.
"63,000. That number that they say is very low because things aren't reported. 63,000. You don't hear about that."
You don't hear about that because it is a lie. But lies never die with Trump.
Lying is the one character trait Trump appears to have perfected. He will use any unfounded and or debunked claim uttered by any wingnut pundit or congressperson that he feels helps his cause.
Snopes wrote a big article about this claim and rated it "False."
Not only was evidence for that claim lacking, it would require a seemingly superhuman murder spree by the nation’s roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants to be true...
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According to data provided for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 260,743 homicides in the United States took place from 2002 through 2016 (the most recent year available). It thus seems mathematically impossible that undocumented immigrants, who make up roughly 3 percent of the population, could have committed just under a quarter of all homicides in the United States during that time period. The erroneous figure appears to have originated in a May 2006 post by Republican Rep. Steve King of Iowa complaining about the “Day Without an Immigrant” campaign calling attention to the contributions of immigrants to U.S. community.
Trump might as well spew statistics generated by the KKK if he's going to cite Rep. King on these claims.
Hopefully, the media will push back against this outrageous lie the next time he spews it, but don't hold your breath.
