Proceedings in the Life and Work of an
Elk Mountain Home School Student
By Abram Leyzorek,
Twelfth Grade
Abram Leyzorek
January 29, 2019
Why the “Fact-Checker” Websites Need Fact-Checking on President Trump’s Border Wall Claims
“Fact-checker” websites such as PolitiFact (Miriam) often question the truthfulness of numerous claims made by United States’ President Donald Trump. Many of his claims that have been questioned concern the efficacy and necessity of his proposed Southern border Wall. In fact, a recent report from the Washington Post claimed that “two years after taking the oath of office, President Trump has made 8,158 false or misleading claims,” according to information from the database of an organization that monitors the President’s statements called The Fact Checker (Kessler et. al.). But, due diligence requires one to question the self-proclaimed “fact-checkers” themselves before one can concede any of their accusations against the President. However, conducting a thorough review of the rebuttals to President Trump’s claims would be a hard task for one individual. Thus, sampling will be used to assess the credibility of the fact-checkers.
A recent Washington Post article provides a convenient starting place for this investigation with several samples of the allegedly “false or misleading” claims made by President Trump. In the first of these, Trump says that border security proposals have received support from Democrats in the past: “Many of these security ideas have been proposed by Democrats themselves, and all of them have been supported by Democrats in the past, including a physical barrier wall or fence” (Kessler et. al., par. 10). The fact-checkers do not dispute this claim, but instead brand it as an overstatement; While, they say, many democrats did vote to pass the Secure Fence Act of 2006 in both the House and Senate, the fence authorized by this act is insubstantial relative to the wall proposed by the President, Trump himself having called it a “nothing wall.” (Kessler et. al, par. 11). However, they do not consider that neither the relative size of the President’s proposed wall nor his opinion of other walls is relevant to his point.
The second sample is more subjective, seemingly more difficult to challenge on factual grounds; the President asserts that building a wall on the Southern Border would have great impact on crime: “If we build a powerful and fully designed see-through steel barrier on our southern border, the crime rate and drug problem in our country would be quickly and greatly reduced. Some say it could be cut in half” (Kessler et. al., par. 15). Of course, the terms “greatly” and “quickly” do not denote specific time-scales or impact levels, and the only actual figure in this quote comes in the phrase “cut in half,” referring to the current crime rate in the United States, which is qualified with the phrase “some say.” Nevertheless, this does not stop the fact-checkers from accusing Trump of claiming that the border wall would reduce crime rates by half (Kessler et. al., par. 16), which, of course, the President does not assert. In fact, it is very unclear what the President is talking about when he says, “some say it could be cut in half;” one cannot know what the President meant by “it,” because in his previous sentence he refers to two separate issues, namely crime rate and “the drug problem.” The fact-checkers, attempting to circumvent this, continue their argument by trying to show that both possible interpretations of the President’s statement are false: they say that, in the first place, most undocumented immigrants cross the border legally and, furthermore, even if they did not their crime rates are comparable to the United States’ citizens. As to the “drug problem,” they re-assert that most drugs enter the country via legal points of entry (POEs) (Kessler et. al., par. 16). The first counter-claim is demonstrably false as it is impossible to enter the U.S. legally without some form of documentation (“How to Enter”). The second rebuttal has factual basis (Chalfin, par. 7-8), but it is unclear what the President meant by “crime rates;” he could have been referring to the overall number of crimes committed in the U.S., not necessarily the incidence of crime within certain population groups. And, finally, the third counter-claim has already been discussed in the previous paragraph. In the end, it seems that Trump is in the clear due to his vagueness and the fact-checkers made unwarranted assumptions and factual errors.
In the final sample, Trump makes two assertions about heroin in the United States. Trump gives statistics on drugs entering the United States from Mexico: “Heroin alone kills 300 Americans a week, 90 percent of which comes across our southern border” (Kessler et. al., par. 8). Why is this allegedly misleading? The Fact Checker cites a 2018 report by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), quoting the following: “A small percentage of all heroin seized by [Customs and Border Protection] along the land border was between Ports of Entry (POEs)” (Kessler et. al., par. 9). The Fact Checker takes this to mean that a border wall would have little to no effect on the amount of heroin coming across the United States’ Southern border from Mexico, but a closer analysis exposes this as an unfounded assumption: the quote from the DEA was not referring to the total amount of heroin coming across the Southern border between POEs, but rather the total amount “seized” [emphasis added]. The DEA does not claim that all heroin was seized, making the statement irrelevant. Furthermore, in 2017 there were only 16,605 border patrol agents (“Staffing Statistics”) posted along the more than 1,900-mile-long Southern border (Republic). Thus, it is no surprise that some border patrol agents believe they have “a long way to go” before the border is secure (Soular, par. 41). So, it seems that the President again trumps the fact checkers.
While three claims out of more than 8,000 is a very small sample, the fact that all three claims analyzed above are of dubious truthfulness or worse provides a strong indication that fact-checks in general ought not be accepted without criticism. In fact, it is wise to question all information, regardless of origin.
Works Cited
Chalfin, Aaron J. “Do Mexican Immigrants Cause Crime?” Penn Arts & Sciences, 2019, https://crim.sas.upenn.edu/fact-check/do-mexican-
immigrants-cause-crime. Accessed February 14, 2019.
“How to Enter the U.S.” usa.gov, October 26, 2018, https://www.usa.gov/enter-us#item-34787. Accessed February 8, 2019.
Kessler, Glenn, Rizzo, Salvador, and Meg Kelly. “President Trump made 8,158 false or misleading claims in his first two years.” The
Washington Post, January 21, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/01/21/president-trump-made-false-or-misleading-claims-his-first-two-years/?utm_term=.b179654419bb. Accessed January 29, 2019.
Soular, Diana Alba. “Border agents, and the risks at the edge of the line.” The Wall, n.d., https://www.usatoday.com/border-wall/story/us-
border-patrol-control-mexico/633139001/. Accessed January 29, 2019.
The Republic. “THE WALL: How long is the U.S.-Mexico border?” USA Today, September 20, 2017,
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/border-issues/2017/09/19/wall-how-long-us-mexico-border/676001001/. Accessed January 29, 2019.
“U.S. Border Patrol Fiscal Year Staffing Statistics (FY 1992 - FY 2017).” U.S. Customs and Border Protection, December 12, 2017,
https://www.cbp.gov/document/stats/us-border-patrol-fiscal-year-staffing-statistics-fy-1992-fy-2017. Accessed January 29, 2019.
Valverde, Miriam. “Fact-checking Trump's claim on cost of illegal immigration, number of immigrants here illegally.” Politifact,
January 28,2019, https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2019/jan/28/donald-trump/fact-checking-donald-trumps-claim-cost-illegal-imm/. Accessed January 29, 2019.