Trump’s ridiculous claim that “millions” of immigrants came illegally from jails, mental facilities

Former President Donald Trump, who has promised to carry out the "largest domestic deportation operation" in U.S. history if reelected, says an enormous number of immigrants entering the country illegally are people with mental illnesses or criminal records.

President Joe Biden "is letting millions of people from jails, from prisons, from insane asylums, from mental institutions, drug dealers pour in," Trump told reporters May 29 in Manhattan during his falsified business records trial. "Venezuela, 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."

We fact-checked a similar statement by Trump about Venezuela and rated it False. Here, we will examine Trump’s statement that "millions" of immigrants are pouring in from jails and mental institutions — a frequent Trump talking point that reporters have examined and debunked before.

Some migrants have criminal records, but we found no evidence that they add up to millions.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection data shows that from fiscal year 2021 to fiscal year 2024, immigration officials arrested about 103,700 noncitizens with criminal convictions whether in the U.S. or abroad, so long as the conviction was for conduct deemed criminal by the U.S. 

Some key points about this number:

• Includes people stopped at and between ports of entry.

• Not everyone stopped was let in.

• The term "noncitizens" includes people who may have legal immigration status in the U.S., but are not U.S. citizens.

• Fiscal year 2021 includes about four months of Trump’s administration; the data for fiscal year 2024 is incomplete. (The federal fiscal year runs from Oct. 1 to Sept. 30.)

The data reflects the numbers the federal government knows about, but it’s inexhaustive.

"A pro-Trump responder would say (correctly) that countries like Venezuela or Cuba don’t share their criminal databases with the US, and other countries' justice systems are in general disarray anyway (Haiti, Honduras etc.)," border security expert Adam Isacson wrote in an email to PolitiFact.

But Trump’s "millions" statement is "laughable," said Isacson, defense oversight director at the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights advocacy organization.

Including repeat crossers, there’ve been around 8 million encounters at the border since Biden took office, Isacson said.

For reference, encounters data represents events, not people. For example, if one person tries to cross the border three times and is stopped each time, that would be counted as three encounters. This data also doesn’t tell us how many people stayed in the U.S. 

"‘Millions’ would mean one in eight was someone released from a jail or a mental institution, a claim too ridiculous to dignify," Isacson said.

It also "strains belief," he said, that someone with serious mental illness could navigate the route to the U.S. after release from an institution.

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Mike LaSusa, deputy content director for InSight Crime, a think tank focused on crime and security in the Americas, said that because the U.S. government doesn’t stop everyone who crosses, it’s impossible to know exactly how many criminals may have entered.

However, LaSusa said, the claim of ‘millions’ coming from prisons seemed mathematically and logically unlikely. "The trend in recent years has generally been toward locking more people up, not letting them out so they can emigrate," he said.

The federal government’s data showed Border Patrol apprehended 2,033 gang members nationwide from  fiscal years 2021 to 2024. The El Paso Times reported that the Tren de Aragua gang, which originated in Venezuelan prisons, "has been detected in the El Paso-Juárez borderlands among the continuing arrival of thousands of migrants seeking political asylum." The article did not say how many were "detected." CBP data shows that border officials have apprehended 47 Tren de Aragua gang members during Biden’s presidency. 

Under Biden, the U.S. has expelled, removed or returned people out of the U.S. around 3.8 million times, according to PolitiFact’s March analysis of Department of Homeland Security data.

In September 2021, DHS released a memo instructing Immigration and Customs Enforcement to prioritize removing people who have crossed the border in recent years or who threaten public safety. Courts halted those guidelines in 2021, but they were reinstated in 2023 after a Supreme Court decision. Biden on June 4 announced a new order to limit the number of migrants seeking asylum at the border.

Pierluigi Mancini, an Atlanta-based expert on immigrant behavioral health, also told PolitiFact that Trump’s statement about emptying facilities of people with mental illness who are coming to the U.S. "does not make sense because those numbers are not there."

Many people in Latin American countries face barriers to getting mental health treatment, Mancini said, and "if there are mentally ill persons flooding the United States, they are not coming from psychiatric hospitals." 

Often, people pay smugglers thousands of dollars to help them get into the U.S. Also, immigrants usually must wait in Guatemala or Mexico before they try to cross into the U.S. And then they need the physical fortitude to make the journey "something that someone with a serious mental illness may be unable to," Mancini said.

We asked the Trump campaign for its evidence and received no reply. But in 2023, the campaign pointed CNN to an article a Border Patrol veteran wrote for Breitbart, a conservative news website. The article was based on information from an unnamed source at Customs and Border Protection and a Homeland Security intelligence report (we did not see the report and PolitiFact does not rely on anonymous information). The article said the report found the Venezuelan government was freeing inmates, including those convicted of rape and murder, and that they were seen traveling to the border, but included no specific numbers.

The Trump campaign also cited to CNN a 1983 Washington Post article about criminals who came from Cuba via the Mariel boatlift. The article said that Cuba’s then-leader Fidel Castro put inmates and people with mental illness on the boats and that 22,000 arrivals admitted that they were convicts. 

But reporters who were based in South Florida then later said that the claims were inflated. Academics and U.S. federal government researchers agreed. And Trump’s statement wasn’t about historical migration.

Trump said Biden "is letting millions of people from jails, from prisons, from insane asylums, from mental institutions, drug dealers pour in."

The Trump campaign provided no evidence to support this claim to PolitiFact, and news articles the campaign has previously cited don’t prove that millions of such immigrants are coming into the U.S. 

Are there some immigrants with criminal records who try getting into the U.S.? Yes. But Trump’s statement about "millions" is a gross exaggeration. 

We rate this statement Pants on Fire! 

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