No evidence for Donald Trump’s claim that Congo is releasing people from jail into the U.S.

A persistent theme of former President Donald Trump’s false immigration rhetoric is that immigrants are pouring across the border after leaving mental institutions, jails or prisons.

He has made such claims broadly about immigrants, and specifically about people from Venezuela and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

"The Congo has just released a lot of people from jail," Trump said May 31 after his New York conviction for falsifying business records. "Congo, Africa, just released a lot of people, a lot of people from their prisons and jails and brought them into the United States of America."

We found no evidence that Congo’s government releases prisoners and sends them to the United States. We previously also could not corroborate the claim about masses of Venezuelan prisoners coming to the U.S.

Here we’ll focus on Trump’s claims about people from Congo, something he’s been repeating at least since January.

We asked the Trump campaign if he was referring to people who crossed the border legally or illegally and for his evidence that Congolese were coming from jails and prisons to the U.S.

In her response, Trump campaign national press secretary Karoline Leavitt pointed to overall data about illegal immigration including "gotaways" — a term immigration officials use for people who evade U.S. Border Patrol detection. 

"Border Patrol continues to apprehend special interest aliens and terror suspects at the border from countries like the Congo, China, and Afghanistan," she said.

We’ve found that Customs and Border Protection does not publicly release data on "special interest aliens." We’ve also reported that U.S. immigration officials have encountered rising numbers of people on the terrorist watchlist. But not everyone on the list is a terrorist, and not everyone encountered is allowed to enter the country.  

Leavitt also cited a PBS NewsHour story that said human traffickers are "smuggling people from as far away as Congo, India and China." None of these sources said that Congolese were being released from jail or prison and sent to the U.S. 

The Democratic Republic of Congo is the "big Congo," a former Belgian colony that has Kinshasa as its capital, said Lewis Mudge, Central Africa director at Human Rights Watch, a research and advocacy group. The Republic of the Congo is the "little Congo," a former French colony that has Brazzaville as its capital. They are adjacent to each other and separated by the Congo River. The majority of the U.S. Border Patrol encounters are with people from the Democratic Republic of Congo.

In 2022, increased violence exacerbated insecurity in the Democratic Republic of Congo, internally displacing hundreds of thousands of people, according to the United Nations Refugee Agency. The agency says more than 6.2 million people are displaced and 1 million have sought asylum, mostly within Africa. 

U.S. border officials stopped people from both the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Republic of the Congo more than 2,800 times during the Trump administration and have done so more than 3,700 times during Biden’s administration. 

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About 12,600 refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo arrived in the U.S. from fiscal years 2021 to 2022 (latest figures available). Fiscal year 2021, which ran from Oct. 1, 2020, to Sept. 30, 2021, includes a few months of the Trump administration. The numbers of refugees from the Republic of Congo were in the single digits annually for Trump and Biden. Refugees arrive in the U.S. legally and must pass security background checks before being let into the country.

Experts on prisons or the Congo said that they had no evidence to back up Trump’s statement about people coming to the U.S. from Congo’s jails and prisons.

"No one in the Republic of Congo (Brazzaville) is aware of this fact," said Abdoulaye Diarra, Amnesty International’s Central Africa researcher.

Mudge said, "We have looked into this on the DRC side and have seen no evidence of this." 

Helen Fair, a World Prison Brief researcher, also said she could not substantiate Trump’s statement.

"I do a daily news search to keep an eye on what’s going on in prisons around the world, and I haven’t seen any news reports of the mass release of people from prisons in Congo, and certainly not that they’ve then been sent to prisons in the US," Fair told PolitiFact.

Joshua Z. Walker, programs director at the Congo Research Group at New York University, said that beginning in late March, approximately 300 prisoners from the main prison in Kinshasa were released. But Walker said he knew of no evidence that the released prisoners went to the U.S. 

The Congolese government is facing an insurgency by a Rwanda-backed armed group that is occupying much of the government's attention and resources.

"There is no chance that it would be interested in pursuing the costly, complicated, and risky endeavor of sending former prisoners to illegally enter the U.S," Walker said.

Trump said "Congo, Africa, just released a lot of people, a lot of people from their prisons and jails and brought them into the United States of America."

Trump’s comments leave the impression that some official entity in Congo is releasing prisoners and bringing them to the U.S. We found no evidence to back that up.

The Trump campaign pointed to overall data on illegal immigration during Biden’s administration and one news article that said human traffickers  brought people from multiple countries including Congo. There are some immigrants from the Democratic Republic of Congo in the U.S., but that doesn’t mean they were part of a government-run effort to send criminals to the U.S.

We rate this statement Pants on Fire!

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