Nora Ellingsen and Lisa Daniels on Lawfare fact-check President Trump’s claim that the data justify his attempts to shut down immigration from certain countries:
A new, more comprehensive dataset became available to the public. Shirin Sinnar at Stanford Law School received under a Freedom of Information Act request from 2015 the National Security Division’s list of public and unsealed international terrorism and terrorism-related convictions from September 11, 2001 to December 31, 2015. …
Here’s the bottom line:
- The data Trump cited in his speech to the Joint Session of Congress simply don’t support his claims that a “vast majority” of individuals on the list came from outside the United States—unless, that is, you include individuals who were forcibly brought to the United States in order to be prosecuted and exclude all domestic terrorism cases.
- While the data do validate the Executive Order on its statement that hundreds of convicted individuals were born overseas, it actually doesn’t support the policy the executive order embodies.
- Of the hundreds of foreign-born individuals, the vast majority were born in countries not covered by the Executive Order.
- And of the relatively small number of individuals from covered countries—which total 43—the clear majority come from only two countries (Somalia and Yemen), while a vanishingly small percentage of that come from Iran, Sudan, Libya or Syria.
They will have two more posts in this series, analyzing the data and, presumably, giving their conclusions. But at the moment, it appears that Trump was simply pandering to his supporters’ xenophobia. Also interesting? How the right wing played it. Using the results found by the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration and National Interest,
Fox News and Stephen Miller ran with [the Center for Immigration Studies] headline: “Study Reveals 72 Terrorists Came from Countries Covered by Trump Vetting Order,” while the Washington Post fact-checked the study. The Post noted that some of the individuals on the list had entered the United States years before they conducted any crime and many of those individuals were not bomb makers, they engaged in more innocuous activities such as transferring money.
