President Biden spoke to reporters during his first formal news conference on Thursday. Here is a fact check of his remarks.
What was said
“We are sending back the vast majority of the families that come.”
This is false. In February, federal officials recorded about 19,000 family meetings on the southwestern border. Of these, about 7,900 families, or 42 percent, were expelled, past the majority. According to Axios, the rate was 13 percent last week.
Mr. Biden rightly remarked at the news conference later that most meetings about everything led to evictions due to the high percentage of single adults: Out of more than 100,000 encounters on the southwestern border in February, more than 70,000 led to evictions. But this does not apply specifically to families.
What was said
‘I first started dealing with it when I was a US senator – I mean, Vice President, to come up with a dual plan of more than $ 700 million to do the causes of people leaving. What did Trump do? He eliminated that funding. He did not use it. ”
This is false. President Donald J. Trump has the help that Mr. Biden quoted, not completely eliminated.
The federal government increased foreign aid to Central America in 2016 to $ 750 million from $ 338.1 million in the 2014 financial year.
While Trump in his annual budgets called for steep cuts in foreign aid, he did not want to eliminate funding altogether. Congress has finally agreed to reduce aid to Central America to $ 505.9 million in the 2021 financial year. The Trump administration also temporarily suspended aid in April 2019, when the number of migrants at the border increased but funding recovered in October 2019.
What was said
“He actually closed the number of available beds.”
This is exaggerated. As The New York Times reported earlier, Mr. Trump does not “close” bed capacity to house migrant children.
When the Obama administration faced an influx of migrant children, the refugee agency increased its monthly bed capacity in the 2015 financial year to about 8,000 beds, from about 2,000 in the 2011 financial year, according to a report of Government Accountability in 2016. Under the Trump administration, the monthly bed capacity dropped to less than 7,000 in October 2017, but by December 2018 had grown to more than 16,000. By the last full month of Trump, in December 2020, the monthly bed capacity was more than 13,000.
During the pandemic, some shelters reduced occupancy to comply with coronavirus protocols before returning to full capacity this month, as the number of children increased.
What was said
‘Between 1917 and 1971 the filibuster existed, there were a total of 58 motions to break a filibuster. That whole time. Just last year, there were five times as many. ”
Where. The filibuster is an old procedural tactic to delay action against a bill. Mr. Biden emphasized 1917 because the Senate passed a rule that year that allowed a two-thirds majority to “appeal to a garment” or end a debate and vote on a measure. In 1975, the Senate reduced the threshold from two-thirds to three-fifths of the body.
Experts have considered motions to invoke cloture as a ‘useful proxy’ to measure how often filibusters occur.
According to the Senate website, there were 58 motions for colors between 1917 and 1970, but the debate was ended only eight times. In the 116th Congress – from 2019 to 2020, when Democrats were the minority party – there were 328 motions, and 270 resulted in the colors being called. Mr. Biden does not mention that some of the proposals to end the debate were submitted to all but one by Senator Mitch McConnell, a Republican from Kentucky, who was the majority leader at the time.
What was said
“Did you hear them complain when they passed nearly $ 2 trillion in Trump tax cuts, from 83 percent to the highest 1 percent?”
This is exaggerated. Mr. Biden reiterated a point of discussion that has been popular among Democratic politicians for years. This comes from a 2017 study by the Tax Policy Center on the tax reduction law that year. According to the study, the richest 1 percent of Americans will receive about 82.8 percent of the benefits of the tax cut by 2027. But in two other years examined in the study, 2018 and 2025, the researchers estimated that the share of the top 1 percent of tax cuts would be around 20 to 25 percent.