During an interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt on Monday, Donald Trump said immigrants were filling the country with “bad genes” and used lies about decades-old crime statistics to make his point.
Trump has long been obsessed with the idea that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of America — echoing Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler’s rhetoric. For years, he has lied that other countries are purposefully sending criminals to the United States.
As part of his recent weekslong racist smear campaign, Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (Republican, Ohio), falsely said Haitian immigrants had raised the infectious disease rate in Springfield, Ohio. And Trump has been touting his mass deportation agenda, which he says he’ll enact as soon as he’s in office.
“How about allowing people to come through an open border, 13,000 of which were murderers?” Trump told Hewitt, referring to the Biden administration. “Many of them murdered far more than one person, and they’re now happily living in the United States. You know, now, a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we’ve got a lot of bad genes in our country right now. They left, they had 425,000 people come into our country that shouldn’t be here that are criminals.”
The xenophobic claim that immigrants are genetically predisposed to committing violent crimes is shocking and false — but xenophobia is also a cornerstone of Trump’s presidential campaign.
Trump’s numbers are based on heavily manipulated statistics about the criminal conviction records of people with cases in immigration court — cases that span several decades, some long before President Joe Biden was in office, and which include people currently serving prison time.
The full transcript of Trump’s remarks is here.
Responding to a Republican congressman’s request, the Department of Homeland Security recently released statistics on people with criminal conviction histories who are on a list called the “non-detained docket.” The list specifically covers people with cases in immigration court who are not locked up in immigrant detention centres.
The DHS data covers people who’ve been in the United States for over 40 years. And it includes people who entered the country legally with green cards or have other forms of legal status, in addition to people who crossed the border without authorisation. The data showed that as of July, 435,719 people were on the non-detained docket with some sort of conviction in their past. (For context, as NBC News noted, “According to ICE’s fiscal year 2023 budget justification, there were 405,786 convicted criminal immigrants on the non-detained docket as of June 5, 2021, just under five months after Trump left office, indicating many crossed during the Trump administration.”)
Of the people on the non-detained docket, 13,099 had a past conviction for homicide. This doesn’t mean that all of these people are walking free. Many are currently serving a sentence in state or federal prison or in jail — so they are not in immigrant detention.
Others have served their sentences already — though, as the initial DHS letter noted, “most noncitizens who are convicted of homicide are typically not eligible for release from ICE custody.”
Trump and Vance have been lying about these statistics for over a week, as FactCheck.org has documented. Other outlets have extensively covered these details already — as has the US government.
“The data in this letter is being misinterpreted,” the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement released late last month, which was quoted by multiple outlets. “The data goes back decades; it includes individuals who entered the country over the past 40 years or more, the vast majority of whose custody determination was made long before this administration. It also includes many who are under the jurisdiction or currently incarcerated by federal, state or local law enforcement partners.”
FactCheck.org asked the Trump campaign about all these details, and a spokesperson responded only by saying that Trump “will begin the largest mass deportation in history on day one.”