If reelected, former President Donald Trump, vows to carry out the “largest domestic deportation operation” in U.S. history and he claims that the Biden-Harris administration “is letting millions of people from jails, from prisons, from insane asylums, from mental institutions, drug dealers pour in.”

It’s a ridiculous claim, as PolitiFact and many other fact-checkers have pointed out with statistics.

More than ridiculous, too, is Trump’s claim — rated false by Politifact — that in Venezuela’s dictatorship, “If you look at their crime statistics, they’ve gone down 72% in crime because they’re releasing all their criminals into our country because of this horrible president that we have.”

For most longtime South Florida residents, Trump’s claims should be hurtful. We remember what happened during the Mariel boatlift when Fidel Castro’s dictatorship emptied its prisons and mental hospitals and delivered true carnage to South Florida. But even then, the violent crazies amounted to no more than 5% of the decent, hard-working Cubans who arrived in 1980 and embraced the American Dream.

Truth is, there are bad people and violent gangs who do try to cross the border into the United States, and those have to be stopped and returned to their home countries. It’s easy to point at those cases and try to claim that all immigrants seeking entry are here to commit crimes. But virtually every study shows that the majority of refugees — most of them families — are trying to escape corruption and violence. The Biden administration has tried to help those refugees, as has virtually every other administration — Republican or Democrat — over the past half century.

Trump changed all that in his first term as president. He separated babies and children from their parents, with sloppy record-keeping that resulted in children being shipped far away to foster care and their parents sent back to their countries. It was such a cruel and vile policy that most South Florida elected Republicans cried foul. Eventually, the separations stopped, but the damage remains in broken families.

Now in his presidential run against Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump is pointing the finger at her attempts to work out deals with Mexico and Central American countries early on in the Biden-Harris administration to reduce illegal crossings into the United States. He claims that violent crime is up in the United States and undocumented immigrants are to blame.

Not so fast, Mr. Pants on Fire.

There was a spike in violent crime — and it was during Trump’s watch. In 2020, during the final year of Trump’s presidency and in the grip of the COVID-19 pandemic that he mismanaged terribly (don’t inject bleach, please!), the murder rate rose by nearly 30% and assaults rose by over 10%, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

During Biden’s term, violent crime has dropped. It has dropped even in cities like New York that took in more than 150,000 migrants since 2022 when governors in Texas, Florida and other red states started to bus or fly migrants from the border to cities in blue states, the Brennan Center for Justice reported.

Under Biden’s term, there was a surge of migrants the first year of his term but not the violent crime that Trump says there was. In fact, the United States has returned migrants 3.8 million times, according to a March analysis by PolitiFact of Department of Homeland Security records, which is quite a record despite the obstacles faced by having too few agents on the border.

And when a solution was at hand this year, Trump stopped Republicans in Congress from passing a bipartisan bill that had the support of border agents because it would add thousands more officers to patrol the border.

The reality is Trump doesn’t want to fix immigration because he believes it is the boogey man that will help get him reelected. Yet deporting about 11 million immigrants here illegally will have dire consequences for our economy nationwide.

That’s no solution — just more Trump chaos.

Editorial by the Miami Herald

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