The Springfield pet-eating hoax wasn’t Vance’s only immigration lie during debate

The racist rumors about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio came up again this evening during the vice presidential debate between Governor Tim Walz and Senator JD Vance (R-OH).

“Governor Walz has brought up the Springfield community, and he's very concerned about the things I've said,” Vance said after his opponent criticized him for being willing to “make up stories” about migrants , to bring attention to suffering Americans. Vance then listed the problems in Springfield — including overcrowded schools and rising real estate prices — that he said are happening “because we've brought in millions of illegal immigrants who are competing with Americans.” When a presenter clarified that members of Springfield's Haitian community are mostly legal residents of the U.S. and are subject to a regulation called Temporary Protected Status, Vance rebuked her for violating — and attempting to break — the non-fact-checking rule Balance sheet to be corrected with a new litany of lies that no one challenges on stage.

“The rules were that I wouldn't be fact-checked, and since I'm fact-checked, I think it's important to say what's actually going on,” Vance said, before describing some things that weren't the case The case is actually continuing. “There is an application called the CBP One app that allows you to continue as an illegal immigrant, apply for asylum and parole, and gain legal status with a Kamala Harris wand for open borders,” he continued.

CBP One is a real app: Launched in October 2020 under former President Trump's administration, it was initially designed to facilitate cross-border processing at ports of entry. CBP One has grown significantly under President Joe Biden's administration, and Vance is right that migrants can use the app to start the parole process and schedule appointments at ports of entry where they can seek asylum.

But instead of receiving immediate status, as Vance claimed, migrants who use CBP One to request asylum appointments are merely beginning the first step in a legal process that can take months or years — and ultimately end in a deportation order. These appointments are difficult to get. CBP only needs 1,450 per day across the border (down from 1,000 when the app was first launched for asylum seekers). Although more than 5 million appointment requests were made on CBP One between January 2023 and February of this year, only 547,000 migrants were able to secure an appointment, according to CBP data. There are reports of migrants waiting up to six months for an appointment, often in dangerous cities along the U.S.-Mexico border. (When the app first began accepting asylum appointments, migrants could only request them from northern Mexico. The app's reach has now expanded to most of the country, but it is still impossible to request an appointment from anywhere else in the world.)

The app is not a convenient option for migrants and asylum seekers. Thanks to a policy Biden implemented in 2023, it is only For most people who want to seek protection in the United States, this is one option. The “Circumvention of Lawful Pathways Final Rule” denies asylum to anyone who enters the United States from Mexico “without authorization” – that is, without prior appointment – ​​after passing through another country on the way to the United States. For example, under the new rule, someone from Guatemala who traveled to Mexico before crossing the border would be denied asylum unless they made an appointment through the app. (There are some additional exceptions, including for people who were denied asylum in a third country en route to the United States.) Immigrant advocates have called the Lawful Pathways rule an asylum ban.

Vance's other lies and misleading statements, some made at different points in the debate, included unlikely claims about migrant school shootings and claims that Harris was responsible for “94 executive orders” that suspended deportations, decriminalized undocumented immigrants and “massively… “ “Asylum fraud increased. Biden — not Harris — actually tried to impose a 100-day moratorium on deportations in 2021, but was blocked by a federal judge. It's true that Biden and Harris promised to reverse Trump's immigration policies and build a more inclusive system, and they tried to do so for several months, only to abandon the cause after legal challenges and Republican accusations of opening the border.

In fact, Biden is currently on par with Trump's deportation numbers

Biden is actually on par with Trump's previous deportation numbers: He oversaw 1.1 million deportations between fiscal year 2021 and February 2024, according to federal data analyzed by the Migration Policy Institute. In addition to these expulsions, much of which took place at the U.S.-Mexico border, the Biden administration carried out approximately three million migrant “expulsions” at the southern border under a now-defunct policy called Title 42, which Customs and Border Protection allowed migrants to be removed from the country without a hearing on public health grounds.

As Walz pointed out in the debate, Biden and Harris now support one of the most restrictive border laws in decades — but that hasn't stopped Trump, Vance and other Republicans from accusing them of supporting so-called “open borders.” Guidelines. Vance also claimed that Harris “introduced record amounts of fentanyl into our communities.” that the Department of Homeland Security under Biden and Harris has lost 320,000 migrant children, some of whom are “Being used as a drug dealer.”

But most drugs are smuggled through ports of entry, not between them, which is why CBP has spent tens of millions of dollars on AI-enabled machines that scan vehicles for fentanyl and other drugs before entering the United States. The vast majority of fentanyl CBP seized at the border is not smuggled by migrants, but by American citizens – and sometimes the Americans involved in the drug trade at the border are CBP agents themselves.

When it comes to child drug runners and lost migrant children, there is no denying that the crime syndicates that smuggle drugs across the border are not also involved in human smuggling, but they typically demand extortionate amounts of money from migrants. And there is no credible evidence that the government lost 320,000 migrant children. Vance appears to be referring to a federal watchdog report that said 32,000 unaccompanied migrant children who arrived at the border did not show up for their court hearings, while another 291,000 unaccompanied children had not yet received their court notices.

All in all, even if the CBS moderators had fact-checked the debate, Vance's lies about the immigration system were too numerous to debunk on stage. Apparently there was a QR code on the screen, directing viewers to the live fact-check on the CBS News website. Whether anyone actually used it is questionable.

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