Lindsey Graham Fact-Checked on Donald Trump’s Migrant Criminals Claim

Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, was fact-checked by CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday about former President Donald Trump’s migrant criminals claim.

As illegal migrant crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border have surged in recent years, immigration has become a top issue, especially among Republicans who blame the Biden-Harris administration for the situation. While illegal immigration has gone up significantly under President Joe Biden, it also increased in Trump’s last months in office after hitting a low from the COVID-19 pandemic. In July, Newsweek reported, citing Department of Homeland Security (DHS) data, that the average daily illegal crossing decreased to below 1,800 daily encounters, a drop of 55 percent.

On Wednesday, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) released statistics on noncitizens who have been convicted or charged with a crime.

Trump, the GOP presidential nominee, then used those statistics to target Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, claiming that migrant criminal activity happened on Harris’ watch.

“Kamala should immediately cancel her News Conference because it was just revealed that 13,000 convicted murderers entered our Country during her three and a half year period as Border Czar,” the former president wrote in a post on his social media platform, Truth Social, on Friday.

On CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday morning, Tapper showed a clip of Trump, the GOP presidential nominee, calling Harris “mentally disabled.”

“Only a mentally disabled person could’ve allowed this to happen to our country,” the clip showed Trump saying at a rally in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, the day after Harris visited the southern border city of Douglas, Arizona, and pledged to sign a new version of the border security deal that she and other critics say Trump killed when the Senate first introduced it earlier this year.

Tapper said Trump’s statements were insulting to people with actual mental impairments and that Harris is not mentally impaired.

Graham, a loyal Trump ally, responded: “No. I just think she’s crazy liberal.”

When asked by Tapper what he thinks about Trump’s rhetoric, the senator said, “I just think the better course to take is to prosecute the case that her policies are destroying the country.”

Graham then repeated Trump’s claims that only Harris was to blame for migrant crime: “Four hundred thousand people have been let loose in our country, 16,000 people convicted of being a rapist, 13,000 convicted murderers and 400,000 of people generally convicted of crimes were released on her watch.”

Tapper then interjected saying that CNN’s fact-checker looked into those statistics.

“That statistic is actually over decades. So, some of those people you’re talking about are people that came into the country during Trump [administration]. And second of all, some of them are in prison, a lot of them are in prison—not ICE prisons, but federal prisons,” Tapper said.

Newsweek has reached out to Graham’s office as well as Harris’ and Trump’s campaigns via email for comment late Sunday morning.

Trump and other Republicans have accused Harris of failing to act on immigration and border security as vice president, blaming her for the rise in illegal border crossings and dubbing her Biden’s “border czar.” At the time, Biden tasked Harris with leading the administration’s diplomacy with Central American countries—El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras—to address the “root causes” of migration. However, she never was in charge of border security.

When fact-checked by Tapper, Graham brought up the murder of Laken Riley: “The man who killed Laken Riley in Georgia was released by the Biden-Harris administration on parole because they had no capacity at the border to hold him. That’s not a reason to parole people.”

He continued: “I promise you; women have been raped and murdered. People have been hurt by illegal immigrants released into this country without detention. It is a nightmare. It is crazy.”

Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student, was killed in Athens, Georgia, while on a run in February. The suspect in her murder, José Antonio Ibarra, is a Venezuelan illegal immigrant who was granted parole into the U.S. “due to detention capacity at the Central Processing Center in El Paso, Texas,” the DHS previously confirmed to Graham, according to a Senate Judiciary Committee press release from April.

Trump and his base have amplified anti-migrant rhetoric since his first run for president during the 2016 election cycle when he called Mexican migrants “rapists” who are bringing in drugs and crime.

Meanwhile, the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan law and policy institute, said in a May 2024 article: “Numerous studies show that immigration is not linked to higher levels of crime, but rather the opposite…When looking specifically at the relationship between undocumented immigrants and crime, researchers come to similar conclusions.”