In February 2020, Donald Trump said, “I could get elected twice over the wall.” Now he has been elected to a second term.
Following a dramatic presidential race that saw Vice President Kamala Harris replace President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee, The Associated Press declared Donald Trump the winner on Wednesday.
Immigration dominated the 2024 election cycle, highlighting stark differences between the candidates’ rhetoric and policy proposals. As Trump made thousands of false statements connecting unauthorized migrants to crime and other social problems, polls showed growing support among voters for reducing immigration. Harris struck a more positive tone, but her policy proposals — while more moderate than Trump’s — still skewed to the right of the Democratic Party’s traditional approach to immigration.
Ahead of the election, The Marshall Project analyzed more than 12,000 of Trump’s public statements about immigration available on Factba.se, a public database of presidential candidate statements. Trump relied heavily on repetition; Marshall Project reporters identified his most repeated falsehoods about immigrants, some of which he made 500 times or more.
Research shows that the more times a person hears a statement, the more likely they are to believe it, whether it’s true or not.
One of Trump’s most repeated claims this year was that there are millions of immigrants crossing the southern U.S. border who were intentionally released from foreign jails, prisons and asylums, especially in countries like Venezuela. These claims have been routinely debunked by journalists, researchers and fact-checkers.
Pressed multiple times, the Trump campaign has not provided corroboration of the statements. Still, Trump repeated the claim at least 560 times.
Trump’s stated plans for immigration policy in his second term are a continuation of his first.
He vows to finish construction of a wall along the 1,900-mile-long U.S. border with Mexico. About 450 miles of border walls were reportedly built during his first term, though 81% of the construction was replacing old structures. Despite the proven ineffectiveness of such a wall and its cost to taxpayers, Trump has repeated the necessity of a wall more than 675 times.
Trump has outlined plans to carry out mass deportations at a historical scale, removing millions of undocumented people. He’s proposed the use of migrant detention camps, workplace raids and military enforcement, describing the Eisenhower administration’s “Operation Wetback” as a model for humane deportations. Historians widely describe the Eisenhower deportations as inhumane, and critics of Trump’s proposal warn such a massive change in population could lead to unpredictable economic effects on the country.
Trump also said he would restore policies from his first administration, including barring entry to people from Muslim-majority countries, separating families at the border, requiring immigrants to remain in Mexico while their asylum cases are processed and halting programs for refugees. He claims he would end birthright citizenship for people born in the U.S. to undocumented immigrants.
Scholars have long noted the cumulative effect of scapegoating immigration, pointing out how rhetoric shapes public opinion and policy. Experts say Trump’s language on immigration has been instrumental in shifting the boundaries of acceptable discourse, making harsh policies like family separation or mass deportation seem more palatable.
Polls indicate that more Americans favor reducing immigration and strengthening border restrictions. A July Gallup poll found that 55% of respondents wanted less immigration — the highest polling numbers in nearly two decades.
Additional surveys this year showed public support for stricter border measures, with many Americans viewing immigration as a key national issue. In Arizona, 63% of polled voters backed Proposition 314, a ballot measure making it a state crime to cross the border with Mexico outside official entry points, allowing local authorities to enforce immigration laws more directly.
Falsely linking immigration and crime has resulted in real policies in the past in both Republican and Democratic administrations. These include Secure Communities, a Department of Homeland Security Program that flags immigrants in local law enforcement custody for deportation, and the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s 287(g) program, which delegates some immigration enforcement tasks to local law enforcement.
Experts say such policies do not work, and distract from discussion of true causes and solutions.
“None of [these policies] delivered the increased public safety that was promised,” Charis Kubrin, a professor of criminology, law and society at the University of Washington. “Why? Because immigrant criminality was not a problem to begin with.”
Learn about how The Marshall Project is covering the 2024 election’s criminal justice and immigration issues across the U.S. and in our local news teams’ cities.
