Trump’s Claim About Harris’ ‘Crime of the Century’ Has a Major Problem
The former president nevertheless called for his opponent to be “IMPEACHED, PROSECUTED, or BOTH.”
Brandon Bell/Getty Images
An irate, bumbling former president Donald Trump posted an indignant broadside Sunday asserting that Vice President Kamala Harris should be impeached, prosecuted, or both over U.S. immigration policy.
But his withering attack made reference to data released by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) which, according to the Department of Homeland Security, is being “misinterpreted.”
The oft-misleading, oft-misinformed Republican nominee for president, taking to his Truth Social site, also blamed the “Fake News Media” for supposedly not covering the issue, which isn’t true.
“What Comrade Kamala Harris has done to our Country at the Border by allowing 13,099 murderers to roam openly, and be free to kill, is The Crime of the Century,” he wrote in his post. “They have already killed many people, and this is just the beginning. She should be IMPEACHED, PROSECUTED, or BOTH.”
The all-caps fury contrasted against a seemingly much lower-energy Trump, who used essentially the same talking point—“She should be impeached and prosecuted for her actions”—at a rally in Pennsylvania Sunday evening. He claimed, with no basis, that murderous migrants are killing people and then wake up the next morning with no memory of doing so.
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“It’s just like a routine part of life,” Trump said of his imagined scenario of killers who forget their killings.
Meanwhile, the basis for Trump’s screed and rambling are misconstrued falsehoods.
Trump’s claim that Harris allowed “13,099 murderers to roam openly, and be free to kill” references data released by ICE in a letter to a GOP congressman last week that said there were over 400,000 convicted criminals on the non-detained docket in the U.S. as of July, including 13,099 with homicide convictions. That data, however, covers the last 40 years and includes the time when Trump was president.
“The data in this letter is being misinterpreted,” a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, which is in charge of ICE, told CNN. “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.”
In other words, many of those in the data may have entered the U.S. decades ago, some may be in prison, and some may have entered while Trump was in charge.
Trump’s claim that the media isn’t covering the issue is also false—in addition to CNN, the Associated Press, NBC News, and The Washington Post were among the outlets that covered the data, each noting ICE’s clarification that it covers decades.
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