During an April 17 congressional hearing, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called for retraction of a new Danish study that didn’t find a link between Tylenol and autism, repeatedly calling it “garbage” and baselessly suggesting that it was industry-generated and “fraudulent.”

There is no evidence of fraud or industry involvement, and the criticism Kennedy made was a limitation the authors of the paper acknowledged — not legitimate grounds for retraction, according to scientists.

Beginning with a press conference about autism in September — the Kennedy-imposed deadline for knowing the cause of the “autism epidemic” — President Donald Trump has repeatedly told pregnant women not to take Tylenol unless “absolutely necessary.” Kennedy has been a bit more circumspect on the topic, speaking of a “potential association” between prenatal Tylenol, also known as acetaminophen, and later autism diagnoses in children and calling the literature finding a connection “very suggestive.”

As we wrote in September, some studies have shown an association between prenatal acetaminophen use and autism. However, experts told us that these associations were likely not causal, and instead probably due to traits shared among people who tend to take more acetaminophen in pregnancy, such as a hereditary susceptibility to autism.

The new Danish study, published April 13 in JAMA Pediatrics, looked at national prescription fulfillment records for mothers of more than 1.5 million children and corresponding health records, finding no association between taking acetaminophen or taking greater doses of the drug during pregnancy and later autism diagnoses in the children.

When asked about the Danish study at the House Education and Workforce Committee hearing on April 17, Kennedy moved to discredit it. “The study is a garbage study. It should be retracted,” he told Republican Rep. Virginia Foxx of North Carolina. Kennedy went on to criticize the study for relying on prescription records when acetaminophen is also available over the counter. “It was a garbage in, garbage out study,” Kennedy continued. “The industry has the capacity to generate these studies all the time, and it’s fraudulent. It should be retracted.”

The study did rely on prescription data, which can lead to incomplete data on the use of the drug, Dr. Kira Philipsen Prahm, a doctor in the Center for Fetal Medicine at the Copenhagen University Hospital Rigshospitalet and first author of the study, told us via email. But such a limitation “does not automatically invalidate results,” she said. “The key question is whether the misclassification is likely to meaningfully bias the findings.” Her team’s analyses, along with prior research, indicate that “if there were a strong causal effect” of acetaminophen on autism, “it would be unlikely to be entirely obscured by this limitation,” she said.

Brian Lee, a professor of epidemiology at Drexel University’s Dornsife School of Public Health, told us that most acetaminophen is prescribed in Denmark, following restrictions on how much of the medication can be sold without a prescription. This makes Denmark a relatively good location to do a prescription-based study, he said, contrary to Kennedy’s implication that the approach invalidated the study. These restrictions were in place during the latter years of the study.

Furthermore, Prahm said, her team’s study did not find “a pattern suggesting increased risk with greater recorded exposure.” If acetaminophen were causing autism, one would expect to see more cases with increasing doses.

Nor are papers retracted simply because they have limitations, which all studies have. Prahm and her colleagues wrote in their paper that information about individuals’ over-the-counter acetaminophen use was missing and that “thus, the true exposure level among those with low-level exposure was likely underestimated,” while also explaining why they thought this was unlikely to have introduced meaningful bias.

Kennedy has a history of trying to “wield his considerable influence” to “force a retraction of a study without a legitimate reason,” Lee said, referring to a study about a common vaccine ingredient Kennedy said last summer should be retracted.

Legitimate reasons for retraction, Lee said, would include “analytical errors that affect the qualitative conclusions of the study, integrity issues, or loss in confidence of findings by the authors.” Prahm’s study “does not appear to feature any of these issues,” he said, calling Kennedy’s calls for retraction “unwarranted and politically coercive.” Lee was co-author of a 2024 Swedish study that pointed away from a causal association between prenatal acetaminophen use and autism in children, but he was not involved in the new Danish study.

Dr. Per Damkier, a professor in the department of clinical research at the University of Southern Denmark, told us via email that Kennedy “is well outside his domain of expertise” in assessing the scientific merits of the study. Damkier was not involved in the new study but has studied acetaminophen use during pregnancy.

Prahm said that the study was “conducted using nationwide Danish registry data and the pharmaceutical industry was not involved in funding or any other part of the study.” The study lists Danish governmental and hospital funding. One of the nine authors disclosed funding by a pharmaceutical company for unrelated work evaluating a contraceptive pill.

HHS did not reply to a request asking for the basis for Kennedy’s claims about the Danish study.

Missing Context on Acetaminophen in Denmark

Kennedy faulted the Danish study for using prescription data and for the low percentage of women it recorded as using acetaminophen. “Only 2% of the people in this study got Tylenol during pregnancy, according to the endpoint,” Kennedy told lawmakers. “In fact, we know, because Tylenol is available by over the counter, most of you have taken Tylenol. Very few of you have ever gotten a prescription.”

But Kennedy was missing context on acetaminophen in Denmark, which has been increasingly obtained via prescription in recent years.

“Reliance on prescription records alone would be bad in a setting like the US, where most acetaminophen use is” over the counter, Lee said. “However, Denmark is not the US.”

Damkier said that before 2014, “more than 60% of all acetaminophen sold in Denmark” was over the counter. But in late 2013, Denmark limited the quantity of acetaminophen that could be sold without a prescription. Following this change, “more than 80% of acetaminophen sold has been prescription based,” he said, citing his own research on the topic. “I believe exposure data from 2014 and onwards are valid and representative with low risk” of misclassifying acetaminophen use, he said.

The new study looked at prescription records from pregnancies for children born between 1997 to 2022. Damkier said that the study “can be criticized” for using prescription data prior to the change in prescription regulations but that he believes “the conclusions of the authors are substantiated” overall. “By and large, this large population-wide study supports the findings from the most recent studies: Exposure to acetaminophen during pregnancy is not associated with an increased risk of childhood” autism, he said.

Prahm said that she and her co-authors had done further analyses to see if the findings varied before or after 2013, but the team “found no statistical differences between the two periods.”

Kennedy also provided a relatively high-end estimate for acetaminophen use during pregnancy in Denmark. “Fifty percent of the women in Denmark, we know from other studies, actually took Tylenol during pregnancy,” Kennedy said. “So the study was comparing people, women who took Tylenol during pregnancy to women who took Tylenol during pregnancy.”

HHS did not reply to a question about where Kennedy got this statistic, but older, self-reported data from the Danish National Birth Cohort found this relatively high rate of use. Estimates of acetaminophen use during pregnancy vary, and one more recent study​ found that 6% of women reported using the medication during the first trimester.

Lee said that many women in the Danish National Birth Cohort study were missing responses on acetaminophen use and were not included, saying that “the 50% is almost assuredly an overestimate.”

Furthermore, Lee and Prahm both objected to Kennedy’s characterization of the new study as comparing “women who took Tylenol during pregnancy to women who took Tylenol during pregnancy.”

“That is not an accurate description of the study design,” Prahm said. “While some individuals classified as unexposed may in fact have used over-the-counter acetaminophen, this does not mean the two groups are equivalent.”

Pros and Cons of Prescription Data

The Danish study is not alone in using prescription data. Lee explained that using prescription data has “advantages and disadvantages.” An advantage is that it provides an objective record of drug supply, whereas studying over-the-counter exposure requires asking people to report on their own use, he said.

People can misreport their medication use, Prahm said, or the data can be influenced by recall bias, a phenomenon where people can remember things differently depending on later events. For example, a parent with a child diagnosed with autism might remember their medication use during pregnancy differently than a parent without this experience.

Furthermore, while prescription-based studies do miss some exposures to acetaminophen, they are likely to capture the most impactful use.

“Prescription based exposure likely captures those women who use substantial amounts of acetaminophen as opposed to [over-the-counter] based use, which tends to be low and sporadic,” Damkier said. “If there is no signal for prescription-based use, it is consequently exceedingly unlikely that sporadic [over-the-counter] use be associated with an increased risk” of autism.

Regardless, researchers don’t rely on single studies to draw conclusions. Rather, they look for a pattern of replication among studies done using various methods and datasets, David S. Mandell, a psychiatry professor at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine and director of the Center for Mental Health Policy and Services Research, told us via email. “When we see replication, we grow more confident in the findings.”

Multiple studies have found that associations between prenatal acetaminophen use and neurodevelopmental conditions go away when comparing siblings. In recent months, two review studies have pulled together the available data, concluding that the evidence does not show any clear or “clinically important” link between prenatal exposure to the medication and autism.

“We now have studies from Nordic countries, Japan and Taiwan showing that Tylenol doesn’t cause autism,” Mandell said. The degree of acetaminophen use varied in the studies, “and it doesn’t make a difference in the findings.”

Prahm emphasized that her team aimed to “contribute one piece of evidence” to be interpreted in the context of the broader literature. “Overall, the current evidence does not establish a clear association,” she said.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, P.O. Box 58100, Philadelphia, PA 19102. 

The post RFK Jr.’s Unsupported Claims About Tylenol-Autism Study He Called ‘Garbage’ appeared first on FactCheck.org.

A federal indictment against former FBI Director James Comey hinges on the meaning of “86.” The Department of Justice said it indicates a threat of physical harm, while the more common dictionary definition is to throw out or get rid of something. 

Legal experts have said the ambiguity of the meaning will make this a difficult case for the DOJ.

In May 2025, while walking on the beach in North Carolina, Comey said he came across shells arranged to spell out “86 47” — Donald Trump is the 47th president — and he shared the image on Instagram.

According to the online Merriam-Webster dictionary, “eighty-six” is a slang term most commonly used to mean “to throw out,” “to get rid of” or “to refuse service to.” More recently, though, and sparsely, Merriam-Webster says, it has also come to mean “to kill.” And that’s the definition the Department of Justice relies upon.

According to a two-page indictment announced on April 28, Comey “did knowingly and willfully make a threat to take the life of, and to inflict bodily harm upon, the President of the United States” by posting the image of the shells that “a reasonable recipient who is familiar with the circumstances would interpret as a serious expression of an intent to do harm to the President of the United States.”

The indictment includes two charges: threatening the president and “transmitting a threat in interstate commerce” (via Instagram). Combined, the charges carry a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison.

“Threatening the life of the president of the United States will never be tolerated by the Department of Justice,” acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said at a press conference announcing the indictment.

“James Comey disgracefully encouraged a threat on President Trump’s life and posted it on Instagram for the world to see,” FBI Director Kash Patel said in a press release. In the press conference, Patel said the grand jury was presented with the fact that “shortly after posting that threat, he deleted that threat and then issued an apology.”

It’s true that the same day he posted the photo to Instagram, Comey took it down. But he did not apologize.

“I posted earlier a picture of some shells I saw today on a beach walk, which I assumed were a political message,” Comey wrote in a new Instagram message on May 15, 2025. “I didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence. It never occurred to me but I oppose violence of any kind so I took the post down.”

In an interview on MSNBC on May 20, 2025, Comey insisted there was “no dark intention on my part” and that while he regretted the controversy around his post, “it’s hard to have regret about something that, even in hindsight, looks to me to be totally innocent.”

Comey said he thought it was just “a silly picture of shells that I thought was a clever way to express a political viewpoint. And actually I still think it is. I don’t see it the way some people are still saying it is, but again, I don’t want any part of any violence. I’ve never been associated with violence, and so that’s why I took it down.” 

Trump wasn’t buying it.

“He knew exactly what that meant. A child knows what that meant,” Trump said on Fox News on May 16, 2025. “If you’re the FBI director, and you don’t know what that meant, that meant assassination, and it says it loud and clear.”

After the indictment, Trump commented on April 29, “If anybody knows anything about crime, they know 86. … It’s a mob term for kill him. You know, you ever see the movies? ’86’ the mobster says to one of his wonderful associates. ’86 him.’ That means kill him. … People think of it as something having to do with disappearing, but the mob uses that term to say when they want to kill somebody, they say, ’86 the son of a gun.'”

As we said, the Merriam-Webster dictionary says the term “eighty-six” is “slang meaning ‘to throw out,’ ‘to get rid’ of, or ‘to refuse service to.’ It comes from 1930s soda-counter slang meaning that an item was sold out. There is varying anecdotal evidence about why the term eighty-six was used, but the most common theory is that it is rhyming slang for nix.”

“In the 1950s the word underwent some functional shift, and began to be used as a verb,” Merriam-Webster says. “The initial meaning as a verb was ‘to refuse to serve a customer,’ and later took on the slightly extended meaning of ‘to get rid of; to throw out.’ The word was especially used in reference to refusing further bar service to inebriates.”

Merriam-Webster notes, “Among the most recent senses adopted is a logical extension of the previous ones, with the meaning of ‘to kill.’ We do not enter this sense, due to its relative recency and sparseness of use.”

The Oxford English Dictionary also says of the U.S. slang term, “In restaurants and bars, an expression indicating that the supply of an item is exhausted, or that a customer is not to be served.” The OED doesn’t include a definition meaning “to kill.”

When the controversy over Comey’s post first erupted last year, Jesse Sheidlower, adjunct assistant professor in Columbia University’s writing program and formerly editor at large for the Oxford English Dictionary, told the Associated Press, “The original sense is, we are out of an item. But there are a bunch of obvious metaphorical extensions for this. 86 is something that’s not there, something that shouldn’t be there like an undesirable customer. Then it’s a verb, meaning to throw someone out. These are fairly obvious and clear semantic development from the idea of being out of something.”

There are some uses of the phrase as a euphemism for killing someone, he said, but that usage is more rare.

“Yes, it can mean ‘to murder,’” Sheidlower told the New York Times last year. “But without any very specific indication that that’s the intended meaning, you’d never assume that. The notion that Comey was suggesting this is completely preposterous.”

Some legal experts say prosecutors will have a hard time proving Comey “knowingly and willfully” posted the photo as a violent threat.

“Posting numbers constitute a threat? I just don’t accept that,” Jimmy Gurulé, a University of Notre Dame law professor and former federal prosecutor, told the Washington Post. “They are going to have to prove that to a jury — beyond a reasonable doubt. … I don’t think they are going to be able to satisfy that legal threshold.”

“I think this indictment is deeply flawed. I think it’s probably fatally flawed. And here’s why,” CNN legal analyst Elie Honig said on April 28. “The law that Justice Department prosecutors have chosen to charge here requires an intent to kill or physically injure the president of the United States. And I think if you look at this communication, these seashells, it’s just way too ambiguous.

“What does 86 mean? Yes, there have been instances in pop culture and elsewhere where people have used 86 to mean kill, but there have been plenty of other instances, apparently far more instances where it simply means to remove or to cross off a list,” Honig said. “And that ambiguity is going to be a major problem for prosecutors because I will tell you, ambiguity is always the enemy of the prosecutors because you have to prove your case not just by 51% or 75%, you have to prove your case beyond a reasonable doubt. And I don’t see any realistic way prosecutors are going to be able to do that here.”

John Keller, a former senior Justice Department official who led a task force to prosecute violent threats against election workers, told the AP that he agreed the term “86” posted by Comey was “ambiguous — it doesn’t necessarily threaten violence and the fact that it was the FBI Director posting this openly and notoriously on a public social media site suggests that he didn’t intend to convey a threat of violence.”

Fox News legal analyst Jonathan Turley wrote in an opinion piece that despite being “one of Comey’s most vocal and consistent critics,” he believes the indictment is “facially unconstitutional absent some unknown new facts.” In order to convict Comey, he said, “the Justice Department will have to show that his adolescent picture was a ‘true threat'” according to the law. “It is not,” Turley wrote.

At the indictment press conference, Blanche was asked how he intended to prove intent when Comey has said he did not associate “86” with doing physical harm.

Blanche said that over the last year, the Department of Justice has done “a tremendous amount of investigation. And how do you prove intent in any case? You prove intent with witnesses, with documents, with the defendant himself, to the extent is appropriate, and that’s how we’ll prove intent in this case.”

This is the second time Trump’s Justice Department has sought criminal charges against Comey. In September, Comey was indicted on two criminal counts alleging he made a false statement to Congress in 2020 and obstructed a congressional proceeding. In November, a federal judge threw out the case, ruling that Lindsey Halligan, the prosecutor who secured the indictment, was unlawfully appointed to her role. The Justice Department has appealed.

On April 28, Comey released a video message on Substack responding to the latest indictment: “Well, they’re back. This time about a picture of seashells on a North Carolina beach a year ago. And this won’t be the end of it. But nothing has changed with me. I’m still innocent. I’m still not afraid, and I still believe in the independent federal judiciary. So let’s go.”

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, P.O. Box 58100, Philadelphia, PA 19102. 

The post Definition of ‘86’ at the Heart of Comey Indictment appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Two days after an armed man tried to enter the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt cited rhetoric from Democrats that she said is “inspiring violence” against President Donald Trump and other Republicans. But several of the statements she quoted were stripped of their original context, a point that House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries made in a rebuttal.

In prepared remarks in the April 27 press briefing, Leavitt called out a number of congressional Democrats, and a late-night television host, for “hateful and constant and violent rhetoric directed” at Trump. On April 25, security prevented the armed man from accessing the WHCA dinner, which the president and top administration officials attended. After Leavitt’s briefing, the man was charged with attempting to assassinate the president.

For example, the press secretary said: “As the first lady of the United States pointed out this morning, just two days prior to the shooting, ABC’s late-night host, Jimmy Kimmel, disgustingly called first lady Melania Trump an expectant widow. Who in their right mind says a wife would be glowing over the potential murder of her beloved husband?”

Later, Leavitt said she had “a whole host of examples” of “despicable statements” from Democratic lawmakers that she could share. “Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, just this April, this month, said we are in an era of maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time,” she said.

She continued: “Gov. Josh Shapiro said heads need to roll within the administration. Sen. Alex Padilla said people are, quote, ‘dying because of fear and terror caused by the Trump administration.’ Sen. Elizabeth Warren, President Trump is making the country look like a, quote, ‘fascist state.’ Sen. Adam Schiff saying President Trump using a dictator playbook. Sen. Ed Markey calling President Trump a dictator, saying that this administration’s actions are authoritarianism on steroids.”

And finally, reading off more quotes, she said: “Gov. JB Pritzker, never before in my life have I called for mass protests, disruptions. These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace. You have Rep. Pressley saying we’ll see you in the streets. Rep. [LaMonica] McIver, a Democrat representative on Capitol Hill, we will not take this shit from Donald Trump. He thinks he’s a dictator. We are at war.”

But Jeffries, the House minority leader, responded to Leavitt in his own April 27 press conference, calling her a “stone-cold liar” and claiming that the Democrats’ statements were “all taken out of context.”

Some, but not all, of the remarks she highlighted were presented without the context that shows them in a different way than Leavitt presented.

We’ll start with the statements by Jeffries, Kimmel, Shapiro, Padilla, Pritzker and Pressley that lacked important context.

Jeffries

On April 21, the day that Virginia residents voted to allow the state’s congressional district lines to be redrawn — potentially giving Democrats more seats in Congress next year — Jeffries posted about the election results on X.

“House Democrats have crushed Donald Trump’s national gerrymandering scheme,” Jeffries wrote, referring to Trump advising GOP state lawmakers in Texas and other Republican-run states to redraw their congressional district maps to give Republicans an advantage in the midterm elections this fall. After listing several ways that Democrats have stopped or negated those Republican efforts, Jeffries wrote:  “Maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.”

He expanded on his social media post the following day in a press conference celebrating the outcome in Virginia.

Jeffries said: “We are in an era of maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time. And we are going to keep the pressure on Republicans at every single state in the union to ensure, at the end of the day, that there is a fair, national map. Because we believe that it’s the people who should decide who’s in the majority in the next Congress – not Donald Trump and MAGA extremists.”

In an April 27 press conference in which he also condemned political violence, Jeffries responded to Leavitt quoting him without the fuller context about the back-and-forth over redistricting.

“The notion that any of us are concerned with so-called criticism from these phony Republicans as it relates to anything that has been said — certainly as it relates to the comment related to maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time, in connection with the redistricting battle that Republicans launched — I stand by it,” Jeffries said. “You can continue to criticize me for it. I don’t give a damn about your criticism.”

Jeffries noted that the “maximum warfare” phrase didn’t originate with him. It “came from the White House in the summer of 2025 when they started this redistricting battle,” he said. 

He was referring to an August 2025 New York Times article that quoted an unnamed “person close to the president” who told the newspaper that “maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time” was the “White House’s political strategy” on redistricting.

Kimmel

On Thursday, April 23 — two days before the WHCA dinner — ABC’s late-night host, Jimmy Kimmel, included a segment on his show in which he performed a comedic roast similar to what is traditionally done at the correspondents’ dinner. The show spliced in footage of some administration officials facetiously suggesting they were in the audience.

Following a couple of jokes alluding to Trump’s age in that segment, Kimmel said, “And of course our first lady, Melania, is here. So beautiful — Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow.”

Both the president and first lady responded on April 27 with social media posts calling for Kimmel to be fired. Trump described Kimmel’s statement as a “call to violence.”

Likewise, Leavitt said at the press briefing the same day, “Who in their right mind says a wife would be glowing over the potential murder of her beloved husband? … This kind of rhetoric about the president, the first lady and his supporters is completely deranged and it’s unbelievable that the American people are consuming it night after night after night.”

But the context of the statement suggests that Kimmel was making a joke about the age gap between the two. Melania Trump turned 56 on April 26, which Kimmel mentioned, while Donald Trump — the oldest person to be inaugurated as president — is 79 and has a birthday coming up in June.

Kimmel responded to the criticism during his show on April 27, saying that the statement was “obviously” a joke about their age difference. “It was a very light roast joke about the fact that he’s almost 80 and she’s younger than I am. It was not — by any stretch of the definition — a call to assassination.”

The Federal Communications Commission issued an order on April 28 expediting a review of eight local broadcasting licenses held by ABC — a move that critics saw as retaliation from the Trump administration against Kimmel’s broadcaster.

Shapiro

In a January interview with progressive podcast host Brian Tyler Cohen, Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, said that “heads do need to roll, certainly, within the administration” while calling for Kristi Noem, then the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, to be fired over tactics used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in Minneapolis.

After Cohen asked about the possibility of Noem being held accountable through impeachment by Congress, Shapiro said, “As it relates to Noem, she should be fired. The president should fire her. If he doesn’t, I think Congress needs to act.” Acknowledging that impeachment was unlikely, Shapiro said that even a growing number of Republicans appeared to “understand that she is way in over her head and that her directions, and the president’s directions, are violating people’s constitutional rights and undermining who we are.”

Later, when Cohen noted that Noem had been quoted saying that she was simply following instructions from the White House, Shapiro criticized her for not pushing back on “unconstitutional” immigration enforcement orders.

“Yeah, I mean it confirms what we were just talking about a moment ago, which is this is a directive that was sent by the president or [White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Adviser] Stephen Miller or [Vice President] JD Vance to Noem, and Noem didn’t stop and say, ‘Hey, this is unconstitutional, I’m not doing it.’ Instead, she plowed forward and now Ms. Good and Mr. Pretti are dead,” Shapiro said, referring to Renee Good and Alex Pretti, two U.S. citizens who were killed in January by immigration officers in Minneapolis.

Shapiro then said, “People have been disappeared in the community. American civil rights have been violated. None of this is acceptable. Heads do need to roll, certainly, within the administration. But most importantly for the good people of Minnesota and across this country, this directive needs to end. The mission needs to be terminated.”

Padilla

A 57-year-old farmworker from Michoacán, Mexico, named Jaime Alanís died after falling off of a greenhouse roof during an ICE raid in Ventura County, California, in July.

The day after his death, Dana Bash — who was anchoring CNN’s “State of the Union” — asked Sen. Padilla of California, “We learned overnight that a migrant farmworker died after he fell from a roof during ICE raids in Ventura County in your state. Have you been able to talk to the family?”

Padilla answered [emphasis ours]: “I haven’t spoken with the family directly, but I have been in touch with President Teresa Romero of the United Farm Workers union. I have known her for a long time. We’ve been in touch over the last several days. She’s been with the family and other families of people that are literally terrorized and traumatized based on what ICE is doing.

“Again, if all they’re doing is going after serious violent criminals, that’d be one thing. But because of these artificial quotas established by — whether it’s Donald Trump or Stephen Miller or somebody in the administration — it’s causing ICE to get more aggressive, more cruel, more extreme, and these are the results.

“It’s people dying because of fear and terror caused by this administration. It’s not just undocumented immigrants. There’s lawful immigrants that are being rounded up. There’s United States citizens that are being detained. There are military veterans that are being detained.”

Leavitt quoted the portion of his answer in bold as an example of “Democrat elected officials calling for war against the president of the United States and his supporters.”

Pritzker

In an April 2025 speech at a New Hampshire event, Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, said that “these Republicans cannot know a moment of peace,” while calling for Democrats to “fight” and protest against Trump administration policies on immigration and more.

More than 26 minutes into his almost 30-minute speech, the governor said: “Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption. But I am now. These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace. They have to understand that we will fight their cruelty with every megaphone and microphone that we have. We must castigate them on the soapbox and then punish them at the ballot box. They must feel in their bones that when we survive this shameful episode of American history with our democracy intact because we have no alternative but to do just that, that we will relegate their portraits to the museum halls reserved for tyrants and traitors.”

When some Republicans said at the time that Pritzker’s comments could be seen as a call for violence, he told reporters that interpretation was “ridiculous” and not his intent.

“I called for people to take out their megaphones and their microphones, to stand up on soapboxes and get to the ballot box in order to defeat the people who are trying to take so many things away from the American people,” he said. “That has nothing to do with violence.”

Pressley

In the first year of Trump’s second term, Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts attended rallies and called on citizens to demonstrate against some of the administration’s policies.

At a February 2025 rally against the administration’s cuts to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Pressley said, “We are going to litigate, legislate, agitate, and resist because you are worth it. So we will see you in Congress, and the courts, and in the streets.”

The same month, at a rally protesting Elon Musk’s access to the Treasury Department, Pressley said, “We will match their energy with unprecedented organizing, mobilizing, agitating. We will see you in the courts, in Congress, in the streets.”

Leavitt summarized her call to action as, “we’ll see you in the streets,” and cited it as another example of “Democrat elected officials calling for war against the president of the United States and his supporters.”

This isn’t the first time that Pressley’s calls for citizens to demonstrate against government policy have been cast by conservatives as an example of Democrats inciting violence. In 2021, we wrote about a viral meme that had cited her comments regarding postal funding as a call for violence.

Other Quotes

Sens. Warren, Schiff and Markey did, respectively, use the terms “fascist state,” “dictator playbook” and “authoritarianism on steroids” to refer to Trump, his administration or certain policies.

Leavitt criticized such characterizations, saying, “Those who constantly falsely label and slander the president as a fascist, as a threat to democracy and compare him to Hitler to score political points are fueling this kind of violence.”

And Rep. McIver said at the February 2025 rally outside the Treasury Department that “we are at war” while criticizing the Department of Government Efficiency and Musk, the former head of DOGE and a major Trump campaign donor, for being given access to sensitive Treasury data. “Anytime a person can pay $250 million into a campaign and then be given access, full access to the Department of Treasury of the United States of America, we are at war,” McIver said.

Whether those remarks amount to “inspiring violence,” as Leavitt said, we’ll leave for readers to judge. But we would note that the politicians did not explicitly promote violence.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, P.O. Box 58100, Philadelphia, PA 19102. 

The post Providing Context for Leavitt’s Examples of ‘Violent Rhetoric’ appeared first on FactCheck.org.

FactCheck.org has won a National Headliner Award for online beat reporting of government and political coverage. Our series on “How Project 2025 Has Unfolded Under Trump” won first place in that category.

The series, which was published over several days in late September and early October, was written by Eugene Kiely, our former director. Eugene explained in detail how President Donald Trump was implementing or trying to implement many elements of Project 2025, a policy manual that was produced by the Heritage Foundation and written by veterans of Trump’s administrations or campaigns, along with other conservatives. Trump had distanced himself from the document during the 2024 campaign, saying he knew “nothing about Project 2025.”

The judges called the series a “powerful deep dive that showed how Project 2025 was implemented across the federal government. Excellent explanatory lookback at promises made and kept — with an easy-to-navigate presentation.”

The series began by examining Project 2025’s recommendations to “dismantle the administrative state.” Subsequent articles focused on immigration, climate change/fossil fuels, social safety net programs, and divisive cultural issues, such as reproductive rights, transgender protections and DEI, or diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

This is the second year in a row that FactCheck.org has won first place in the National Headliner Awards’ category of online beat reporting of government and political coverage. These awards were founded in 1934 by the Press Club of Atlantic City.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, P.O. Box 58100, Philadelphia, PA 19102. 

The post Project 2025 Series Wins National Headliner Award appeared first on FactCheck.org.

It’s a common, misleading refrain in anti-vaccine circles: Childhood vaccines may be unsafe because few if any have been tested in placebo-controlled trials before being approved. But that claim misunderstands the vaccine safety testing process and takes advantage of a narrow definition of a placebo, scientists told us.

“Not a single childhood vaccine on the schedule has ever been through a double-blind placebo-based trial prior to licensure,” Del Bigtree, a prominent activist with ties to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., said at a March 9 conference that billed itself as being about a “massive epidemic” of vaccine harm. “It is now a known fact they were never done. No placebo trial anywhere in sight,” Bigtree went on to say.

Kennedy has been making similar claims for years. He previously led Children’s Health Defense, a group that says its “mission is ending childhood health epidemics by eliminating toxic exposures” and writes frequently about alleged harms from vaccines, and hired Bigtree as his communications director during his 2024 presidential run. Kennedy has generally refrained from speaking about vaccines in recent months, but in a congressional hearing on April 21, he repeated the claim when stating that he’s “never been anti-vax.”

“I don’t believe all vaccines are bad. I’ve never said that. What I’ve said is they should be safety tested,” Kennedy said, noting that the government is funding the development of a universal flu vaccine and cancer vaccines. (In a 2023 podcast, he said that “no vaccine” is safe and effective, and later denied making those remarks.)

“With one exception, none of the 92 doses of 18 vaccines now given to our kids has ever gone through a randomized, controlled placebo trial,” he continued. “And all I’m saying is we should know a risk profile so that we can inform parents.”

Kennedy made the same basic appeal about placebo-controlled trials on at least three occasions in January.

“Today’s children get between 80 and 92 vaccines and the only ones that have been safety tested in a randomized placebo-controlled trial is the COVID vaccine. None of the other ones have,” Kennedy said in an interview with USA Today on Jan. 16. (As we have written before, this number of routinely recommended vaccines was only ever possible when counting each dose, including annual flu and COVID-19 shots through age 18 and separating out combination vaccines.) “So we do not know whether those vaccines are causing downstream effects,” such as chronic diseases.

And in similar remarks at a Jan. 21 rally in Pennsylvania, he said that without such trials, “we don’t know what the risk profile is.”

On the surface, it seems to be a compelling argument. Most Americans have enough familiarity with science to know that testing a medical product against a placebo control is the most rigorous way to determine if the product works. Such trials can also reveal common side effects.

All approved vaccines have been tested for safety, experts say, but that does not always involve a saline-only placebo, as Kennedy and others often contend must be used. There are scientific and ethical reasons to choose other controls, such as another vaccine or a solution with inactive ingredients, as Johns Hopkins’ International Vaccine Access Center explains.

Moreover, while the trial process ensures a certain level of safety, trials are unlikely to be large enough to rule out side effects that are rare, the center says. That information can only come from vaccine safety surveillance systems and population-level studies with tens of thousands or millions of people.

“Safety is not determined by any one study,” John Grabenstein, a vaccinologist and director for scientific communications for the nonprofit Immunize.org, told us. “It’s determined by the collection of all of the studies.”

Kennedy’s statement that the “risk profile” of childhood vaccines is unknown without placebo-controlled trials is “clearly false,” Jeffrey S. Morris, director of the division of biostatistics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, told us, because it “dismisses all of the other studies and data that are present.”

“Many of these vaccines have been given for a long, long time,” Dr. Kathryn Edwards, a now-retired Vanderbilt University vaccinologist, told us. “Their safety profiles have been confirmed with observational studies involving millions of children.”

With Kennedy at the helm of HHS, the focus on narrowly defined placebo-controlled trials for vaccines has begun to shape messaging and policy. In May, as we wrote, an HHS spokesperson said “very little” is known about “the actual risk profiles” of vaccines because of a lack of testing against an “inert placebo,” and suggested that regulators would require placebo testing for all “new” vaccines. A few weeks later, the Food and Drug Administration indicated it would now require new placebo-controlled trials to approve updated COVID-19 vaccines for lower-risk populations.

In December, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which Kennedy had remade earlier in the year, hosted Aaron Siri, a vaccine injury lawyer, who emphasized the lack of pre-licensure placebo-controlled trials for routine injected childhood vaccines in a more than 90-minute presentation.

And when the CDC unilaterally cut the number of universally recommended childhood vaccines in January, officials noted a lack of placebo-controlled trials for some shots. (On March 16, a judge temporarily blocked that policy and all others made by the current ACIP, preliminarily finding that the government likely had not followed proper procedures when making vaccine schedule changes and appointing committee members. HHS has since issued a new charter for ACIP, altering the rules to permit other experts, including those specializing in “recovery from serious vaccine injuries.”)

While we’ve addressed the vaccine-placebo claim several times before, it remains a persistent misconception. Here, we discuss it in detail, explaining why certain childhood vaccines were not tested against saline placebos — and why scientists say that’s not a reason for concern.

Narrowly Defined Placebos

As we’ve explained before, those making these claims are very strict in their definition of a placebo. They accept saltwater, or saline, as a placebo control, or another substance they say would be “inert” — but often don’t count similar controls that contain inactive ingredients to match aspects of the vaccine’s formulation but lack the antigen, which is the key part of the vaccine that the immune system responds to in order to generate protection.

These inactive ingredients can include surfactants to keep the vaccine well-mixed; stabilizers, preservatives or buffers to keep the vaccines safe and long-lasting; as well as trace ingredients leftover from the vaccine manufacturing process.

“Even though it’s not a saline placebo, it is considered a valid placebo,” Morris said.

In fact, perhaps the most famous placebo-controlled vaccine trial — the massive 1954 Salk polio vaccine trial — used a reddish liquid virtually identical to the one in the vaccine, but without killed polio virus, as a placebo. As the pediatrician Dr. Vincent Iannelli explains on his Vaxopedia blog, this was done to help keep participants and the people running the trial unaware of who got a placebo versus a real vaccine, or what’s known as blinding.

The varicella, or chickenpox, vaccine, was also tested against a placebo that contained a stabilizer and a trace amount of the antibiotic neomycin. The vaccine contains trace neomycin because it is made by growing weakened virus in cells and the antibiotic is used to prevent contamination. While most of the neomycin is removed in purification, a residual amount remains.

There is no evidence that this trace antibiotic causes any problems, except for rare individuals who are allergic, the University of Oxford’s Vaccine Knowledge Project explains. Even for those who are allergic, the risk is theoretical, the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia notes, as minute amounts of antibiotics in vaccines “have never been clearly found to cause severe allergic reactions.”

“Studies involving approximately 11,000 children and adults followed for periods ranging from 2 to 12 years showed the vaccine to be safe and effective,” two FDA scientists wrote in the Journal of Pediatrics, explaining the agency’s decision to approve the chickenpox vaccine in 1995. “No severe side effects attributable to vaccination were reported in healthy recipients,” they added.

Continued safety monitoring — including a review of 22 years of postmarketing safety data — has borne out the overall safety of the chickenpox vaccine.

The two available rotavirus vaccines, which are given orally, also used solutions with various inactive ingredients as placebo controls when they were evaluated in randomized controlled trials.

Other Controls

Activists opposed to the childhood vaccination schedule also don’t accept controls that include adjuvants, which are ingredients that help the immune system respond to a vaccine and create a more protective response, sometimes lowering the number of needed doses or the amount of antigen. Adjuvants often cause temporary, local reactions, such as redness and swelling at an injection site, and therefore can be useful when a trial is blinded.

One of the issues with a saline placebo is that there usually isn’t any kind of typical, mild vaccine reaction, which could tip someone off that they received a placebo. If people know they received a placebo, they might alter their behavior, which could change their risk for the disease in question, or change their perception of any side effects.

Trials that use adjuvant controls isolate the effect of the vaccine’s active ingredient, or antigen, and determine if it is responsible for additional side effects, Johns Hopkins and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia explain. One commonly used adjuvant is aluminum, which groups such as Children’s Health Defense have long claimed is problematic. But the available scientific evidence does not indicate it is dangerous in the small amounts present in vaccines, as we’ve explained when reporting on such claims in the past.

“The way aluminum is processed is that the vaccine stays near the injection site and is released more slowly over time,” Charlotte Moser, co-director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told us. The prolonged exposure makes for a strong immune response, but does tend to cause pain, redness and inflammation at the injection site. Including the adjuvant in the control “makes the experiment more robust,” Moser said.

In other cases, other vaccines are used as a control, both to preserve blinding and because of ethical concerns. 

“Often what you’re doing is comparing a new vaccine with an old vaccine,” Edwards said. If a vaccine against a particular pathogen already exists, it usually is unethical to withhold the vaccine. “Unvaccinated children can contract dangerous illnesses,” the American Academy of Pediatrics explains. “Parents of children in the placebo group would not know they didn’t get the vaccine and that their child is unprotected.” And in many cases, part of the scientific question is whether the new vaccine is at least as good as the old one.

Other vaccines may still be used as controls even with a new vaccine if it’s determined that doing so would be needed to provide some benefit to all participants.

The New York University medical ethicist Arthur Caplan and colleagues wrote in a July 2025 article published in EMBO Reports that placebo controls “are very rarely ethical in vaccine trials,” and only permitted if there is genuine uncertainty — or what researchers call equipoise — about the benefit of the vaccine.

The issue of placebos is particularly fraught with studies involving children. Although the FDA has not traditionally had its own guidelines for placebos in vaccine trials, it has issued specialized guidelines for medical products involving children, emphasizing that trials should “maximize benefit and minimize risk.”

The agency told us in 2023 that a “placebo control, such as saline, is not required to determine the safety (or effectiveness) of a vaccine” and that in some cases is “considered unethical.”

The use of an adjuvant or other vaccine as a control does not mean the vaccine hasn’t been sufficiently studied for safety, experts told us.

“The concerns being raised around the need for fully inert placebos aim to distract,” Moser said, adding that the “notion that companies are making vaccines and not testing them appropriately is completely unfounded.”

“Every childhood vaccine is studied extensively before licensing, and the FDA and its counterparts around the world have to agree to the study designs before those studies are even conducted,” Grabenstein said. “It’s up to the FDA to choose the acceptable comparator.”

When the FDA reviews a product, Grabenstein noted, regulators scrutinize the data by reviewing information on each study participant.

“You’re seeing a part of the tip of the iceberg,” he said of the information presented in a vaccine’s package insert. “Regulators have reviewed far more extensive original data.” (Grabenstein worked for Merck Vaccines for more than a decade. He said he has no financial ties to the company now.)

Before licensure of any major new vaccine, an independent committee of experts typically also advises the agency on whether to approve the vaccine; a similar process occurs within the CDC when the agency decides how approved vaccines will be used.

In an email, Bigtree objected to the notion of accepting non-inert placebo trials if the FDA allows them, saying “that this is what consumer advocacy groups like ICAN,” Bigtree’s nonprofit, “are for,” and going on to point to instances of FDA failures. He allowed that efficacy trials could use other controls, but said that for safety trials, the placebo must not have any pharmacological effect. “To establish a true safety baseline equivalent to a person receiving ‘nothing at all’, only a saline placebo is acceptable,” he said. “That is not my opinion, that is scientific fact.”

Bigtree also said that “virtually every independent expert who has evaluated systems like VAERS,” ​​the CDC and FDA’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, “describes them as inaccurate, underpowered, and fundamentally unreliable,” although he still thought they could “yield meaningful studies … if there were any institutional appetite for transparency and honest inquiry.”

As we have explained before, VAERS is just one of several surveillance systems the government uses to monitor vaccine safety. While VAERS is passive, accepting voluntary, unverified reports of potential vaccine side effects, other systems are active, automatically collecting information at regular intervals. While no system is perfect, the surveillance systems have successfully identified problems with certain vaccines, which led to restrictions on or the removal of some from the market.

A placebo “can mean saline, and it can be something else considered inert. However, that would not include, for example, adjuvants,” a senior partner for Siri’s law firm said when we asked several questions about Siri’s statements in his presentation before ACIP. “Mr. Siri’s publicly available presentations and writings make plain the issues with post-licensure safety.”

HHS did not respond to a request for comment.

It’s worth noting that for some vaccines, placebo or other randomized controlled trials have also occurred after licensure. Activists’ claims about placebo-controlled trials often focus on pre-licensure studies, but studies done after U.S. approval are part of the overall evidence on a vaccine or general vaccine antigen.

Scientists “continue to study vaccines after they are licensed, and yes, controls are included,” Moser said.

Pneumococcal Vaccine

In his presentation before ACIP, Siri repeatedly claimed that childhood vaccines had been insufficiently tested for safety.

“The concern is that not one of them was licensed based on a inert, a placebo-controlled clinical trial,” he said, referring to the “standalone, routine, injected” childhood vaccines on the vaccine schedule. “Nor was any vaccine used as a control to license any of those vaccines licensed based on a placebo-controlled trial.”

As one key example, Siri highlighted the pneumococcal vaccine, noting that the current childhood pneumococcal vaccines were licensed based on trials with earlier versions of the vaccine, but that the first licensed vaccine — Prevnar 7 — had been tested against an investigational vaccine that had not yet been approved.

“That’s not an appropriate control. It does not establish a baseline of safety,” he said. Earlier in the meeting, he said that since Prevnar 7 was the first of its kind, “there was certainly no excuse to not use an inert control for that trial.” Siri, who has represented and advised Kennedy, has filed petitions on behalf of ICAN to pause distribution of vaccines or remove them from the market. He also said that the pneumococcal vaccine trial data “raises some very serious safety concerns.”

Scientists, however, told us there were ethical reasons for choosing an investigational vaccine as the control, and that safety was extensively studied.

“Subjecting what turned out to be half of more than 37,000 children to four injections — and these are infants and young children — with no potential benefit whatsoever was not ethical,” Dr. Steven Black, a pediatric infectious disease specialist and veteran vaccine clinical trialist who was involved in the original Prevnar trial, told us. The pneumococcal vaccine is given at 2, 4, 6 and 12 through 15 months of age.

The initial decision to use another vaccine as the control was his, he said, but when he presented the plan to the study’s Institutional Review Board, an independent committee that protects the rights and welfare of trial participants, he said the group “concurred that given the option of an active control vaccine that could provide benefit, that vaccinating so many children with four doses of saline was unethical.”

“We felt that by providing a control vaccine against meningococcal disease, for which there was not a vaccine in use in the United States at that time, would provide the potential of some protection for those infants,” Black said.

The decision to use an investigational vaccine was out of necessity.

“There was really a limited menu,” Black explained. “Most of the vaccines that you might have chosen were already recommended routinely,” preventing their inclusion as a control in a trial.

The team therefore chose a meningococcal vaccine that, like the pneumococcal vaccine, had been through phase 2 trials. Phase 2 is the step before the main, large trial, but after basic safety testing in phase 1.

Black, who is the co-director of the Global Vaccine Data Network, noted that following the Prevnar trial, the investigational vaccine was used in the U.K. during a meningococcal outbreak. “The U.K. felt comfortable with the safety data from the control,” he said.

Black said the safety assessment in the Prevnar trial “was the most extensive of any safety evaluation for a phase 3 trial that had been conducted in the United States prior to that.” Medical professionals looked each time a child in either vaccine group sought medical attention to see if there was a potential vaccine concern, he said, and any serious event was reported to the FDA.

“When the trial results were presented to the FDA review committee, the chair of the committee commented that in terms of the safety assessment, the bar had been raised by this trial for the conduct of future trials,” Black said.

The data safety monitoring board monitored all the safety events as they were occurring, Black added, and if there had been a cluster of events, the trial would have been unblinded. “We would have notified the FDA,” he said. “So we were not only looking at individual events, we were looking for patterns as well and didn’t see any.”

Additional safety data accrued in post-licensure studies of the original vaccine, as well as in the trials testing newer versions of the vaccine against its predecessors. Today’s pneumococcal vaccines for children target either 15 or 20 pneumococcal bacterial serotypes.

The vaccine, Black said, has been “extremely effective in reducing the risk of invasive pneumococcal disease in children” and indirectly has reduced carriage of the bacteria and disease in parents and grandparents. “The number of lives saved has been tremendous,” he said. “And serious confirmed safety concerns have not been identified despite millions of doses having been given.”

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, P.O. Box 58100, Philadelphia, PA 19102. 

The post The Persistent Misleading Claim That Vaccines Aren’t Properly Tested for Safety appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Summary

Under President Donald Trump’s second term:

• Job growth slowed, with a total of 369,000 jobs created as of March. The unemployment rate ticked up to 4.3%.

• Inflation worsened a bit, and gasoline prices increased after U.S.-Israeli airstrikes on Iran. 

• Average weekly earnings of private-sector workers, adjusted for inflation, rose 1.0%.

• The economy grew 2.1% in 2025.

• Consumer sentiment has now hit a record low.

• The number of apprehensions at the U.S. border with Mexico decreased about 92%, and refugee admissions dropped by the same percentage.

• The percentage of the population lacking health insurance held steady in the first six months of 2025.

• The trade deficit dropped 14% for the most recent 12 months.

• The number of murders nationwide has continued to decline, a trend that began in 2022.

• The stock market fell dramatically after the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran, then rebounded and reached new heights.

• Oil production went up 2.7%, and oil imports declined almost 6.6%. Carbon emissions increased slightly.

• About 3 million fewer people are receiving federal food assistance.

• The federal debt held by the public rose about 8.6%.

Analysis

This is the first update in our “Numbers” series for Trump’s second term. Expect additional updates to be published every three months for the remainder of his presidency, as we did for his predecessors, starting with President Barack Obama in 2012.

These are just some of the many economic and social statistics that indicate how the U.S. is faring. We will include a few other data categories, such as household income and the poverty rate, later this year when the newest government figures are available.

We only present the numbers, which, depending on the reader’s perspective, may seem positive, negative or neither. How much credit or blame the president should receive for the statistics is also in the eye of the beholder.

Jobs and Unemployment

Job growth slowed markedly, and unemployment crept up during Trump’s second term. Manufacturing jobs continued to decline despite new tariffs on imports. Job opportunities declined.

Employment — Employment continued growing during Trump’s first 14 months in office, but far more slowly than it had in the previous 14 months.

The most recent figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics show an increase of only 369,000 in total nonfarm employment between January 2025 and March 2026. The total went up four times faster before, rising by 1,565,000 during the final 14 months of President Joe Biden’s administration, even after the BLS revised Biden’s figures downward in February as a result of its annual “benchmarking” study.

Much of the sluggishness under Trump is due to the president’s deliberate slashing of the federal workforce. Federal government employment has fallen by 352,000, or 11.7%, since he took office.

Looking only at the private sector — excluding federal, state and local government workers — 609,000 jobs were added during Trump’s term so far. But that’s still far less than the 1,044,000 added in the preceding 14 months.

Last August, after the BLS reported only 73,000 jobs had been gained in July, Trump called the figures “rigged” and “phony” and fired BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer. But the numbers have only grown worse since then. The gain for July has been revised downward to 64,000, and the BLS reports that the economy actually lost jobs in August, October, December and February.

Manufacturing Jobs — A year ago, Trump predicted a flood of new factory jobs as he announced sweeping new tariffs on what he called “Liberation Day,” April 2, 2025.

“Jobs and factories will come roaring back into our country,” he said. But so far that hasn’t happened. The economy has continued to lose manufacturing jobs.

During Trump’s first 14 months, the loss was 82,000, following a loss of 186,000 in the preceding 14 months.

Labor Force Participation — The labor force participation rate declined a bit in Trump’s second term, dropping from 62.6% in January 2025 to 61.9% as of March.

The rate is the portion of the population over age 16 that is working or seeking work. It generally has been in a long decline as the population ages and people retire.

Unemployment — The unemployment rate has gone up slightly since Trump took office. It was 4.0% in January 2025, and most recently was 4.3% in March.

But that is still well below the historical norm. The median rate for all months since 1948 is 5.5%.

Job Openings — The number of job openings declined by 549,000 under Trump, to 6.9 million as of the last day of February. It’s a drop of 7.4%.

Meanwhile, the number of people officially listed as unemployed and seeking work rose by 374,000, to 7.2 million as of March. When Trump took office there were more openings than job-seekers. Now it’s the opposite.

Wages and Inflation

CPI — Trump campaigned on a promise to reduce inflation, but since he took office it has worsened a bit.

In the 12 months before Trump took office, the Consumer Price Index, the most commonly cited measure of inflation, rose 3.0%. And in the most recent BLS report, the 12-month increase was 3.3%.

Over Trump’s first 14 months in office, the CPI went up 3.6%, pushed up most recently by the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran, which have sent up gasoline prices in particular.

Fuel prices — always volatile — had been a bright spot for Trump before. As of our previous “Trump’s Numbers” report in January, the national average price for regular gasoline at the pump had declined to $2.78 a gallon, down from $3.11 the week he was sworn in for his second term. But as of the week ending April 20, it was up to $4.04, according to the Energy Information Administration. That’s an increase of 29.9% since Trump’s inauguration.

Inflation is still higher than the Federal Reserve would like, and it’s going in the wrong direction as measured by the Fed’s preferred metric, the Personal Consumption Expenditures Index, compiled by the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

The central bank’s target is a 2% annual increase in the PCE. When Trump took office, the 12-month increase in the PCE was 2.5%. But the most recent report put the 12-month increase at 2.8% in February. And that does not reflect the effects of the war on Iran, which began the last day of February. (PCE figures take longer to collect than the CPI, but the Fed prefers the measure because it is more comprehensive and adjusts more quickly to consumers’ buying habits.)

Wages — Wage increases accelerated under Trump, even adjusted for worsening inflation.

The average weekly earnings of all private-sector workers, adjusted for inflation, rose 1.0% during Trump’s first 14 months. They were rising when he took office, but had only gone up 0.4% in the preceding 14 months.

Those figures include professionals, executives and supervisory employees, whose pay is normally higher. But rank-and-file wage earners are seeing gains just as rapid as those of their bosses. For private-sector production and nonsupervisory employees, real average earnings also rose 1.2% under Trump through March, after a 0.8% rise in the preceding 14-month period.

Economic Growth

The U.S. economy resembled a roller coaster last year – with weak first and fourth quarters but strong second and third quarters. 

The end result: a respectable, but underachieving 2.1% growth for the year.  

“Despite a solid 2.1% expansion for the full year, 2025 will likely be remembered as the year that ‘could have been,’” EY-Parthenon Chief Economist Gregory Daco said in an April 9 analysis. “A rare confluence of supply shocks — tariffs, tighter immigration and elevated policy uncertainty — constrained activity, leaving growth below what strong organic productivity gains and rapid AI adoption would have otherwise supported.”

The nation’s real gross domestic product declined at an annual rate of 0.6% in the first quarter and expanded by only 0.5% in the fourth quarter, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. In between, the economy grew at the robust annual rates of 3.8% in the second quarter and 4.4% in the third quarter.  

For the full year, the U.S. finished with the weakest GDP since 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic wrecked the economy. (See the chart below.)

As for this year, economic experts project that the U.S. economy will continue to grow – but they warn that projections carry what S&P Global called “a high degree of unpredictability” because of the Middle East conflict. 

In an economic outlook released March 25, S&P Global Ratings projected 2.2% real GDP growth for the U.S. this year, assuming that the war will result in only a “temporary, supply-driven oil shock that recovers inside the year.” 

Similarly, Michael Wolf, a senior manager and global economist at Deloitte Touche, wrote in late March that Deloitte economists project U.S. growth at 2.2% – while noting that “conditions remain highly fluid.”

Daco, who is also the president of the National Association for Business Economics, said in a press release that an NABE survey of economic forecasters conducted from March 5 to March 13 found that most of those surveyed expect “recent geopolitical developments to reduce 2026 GDP growth.” 

As of April 21, the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s GDPNow model was projecting growth of 1.2% for the first quarter. The BEA first quarter estimate will be released on April 30.

Consumer Sentiment

When Trump took office, consumers surveyed by the University of Michigan expressed concern that his plan to increase tariffs would increase prices, and that turned out to be true. Consumers now have an added inflationary concern: the joint U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran that started on Feb. 28. Over a nearly two-month period, the war has driven up the cost of oil, gasoline, and other goods and services.  

Consumer sentiment, which already has been stubbornly low under Trump, has now hit a record low. 

The university’s preliminary Index of Consumer Sentiment for April was 47.6 – the lowest since at least 1978, according to the university’s online database. 

“Consumer sentiment sank about 11% this month, extending a decline that began with the start of the Iran conflict,” Joanne W. Hsu, director of the Surveys of Consumers, said in a press release issued this month. “Demographic groups across age, income, and political party all posted setbacks in sentiment, as did every component of the index, reflecting the widespread nature of this month’s fall.”

April’s preliminary number, which could change when it is finalized on April 24, is 24.1 points lower than it was in January 2025, when Trump took the oath of office for a second time. 

In its most recent Consumer Confidence Survey, the Conference Board — a research organization with more than 2,000 member companies — reported that consumer confidence “improved modestly” in March for the second straight month. “Nonetheless, the Index has been on a general downward trend since 2021,” Dana M. Peterson, the board’s chief economist, said in a March 31 press release. 

The Conference Board’s April report is scheduled to be released April 28. 

Home Prices & Homeownership 

Homeownership — Homeowner rates have remained largely unchanged under Trump.

The most recent homeownership rate, which the Census Bureau measures as the percentage of “occupied housing units that are owner-occupied,” was 65.7% in the fourth quarter of 2025 — identical to the rate during Biden’s last quarter in office. 

Last year’s fourth quarter rate was up slightly from the previous quarter, but the difference was not statistically meaningful, according to a February press release from the bureau.

The homeownership rate remained largely unchanged last year even though the Federal Reserve cut interest rates three times and mortgage rates declined. 

Days before Trump took office, the average 30-year fixed rate mortgage was 7.04% for the week ending Jan. 16, 2025, according to Freddie Mac. As of the week ending April 16, the average 30-year fixed rate mortgage was 6.30%.

In a Dec. 12 article, Realtor.com Senior Economic Research Analyst Hannah Jones said homeownership rates continue to be affected by “[p]ersistent affordability challenges and a shortage of reasonably priced homes.”

Home Prices – Home prices have remained fairly stable under Trump.

The national median price of an existing, single-family home sold in March was $412,400, according to the National Association of Realtors. That was only 3.6% higher than it was in January 2025, when Biden left office and the median price was $398,100. 

Year-over-year, the median sales price in March was only 1.25% higher – a record high for March, despite a decline in home sales for the month, NAR Chief Economist Lawrence Yun said in a press release. Existing single-family home sales were down 3.5% from February and 0.3% year-over-year, the NAR data show.

“March home sales remained sluggish and below last year’s pace,” Yun said. “Lower consumer confidence and softer job growth continue to hold back buyers.”

“Because inventory remains limited,” he added, “the median home price rose to a new record high for the month of March.”

Existing home sales and prices for April are scheduled for release on May 11.

Immigration

Illegal immigration continues to be historically low since Trump took office for his second term.

While it’s impossible to know how many people successfully cross illegally into the U.S., for the purposes of our Numbers stories going back to Obama, we have calculated the change in border apprehensions as a proxy to measure illegal border crossings. Over the last 12 months under Trump, there were 85,218 immigrants apprehended attempting to illegally cross the southern border. That’s down nearly 92% from the last 12 months under Biden.

Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, an associate policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, said that one of the biggest drivers of the dramatic drop in illegal immigration was a new policy, which Trump invoked on his first day in office, that “effectively … people were no longer able to apply for asylum” at the border. That was one of the major drivers of immigration during the Biden administration, with hundreds of thousands of migrants crossing the border and “sort of waiting to be intercepted and asking for asylum.”

“So now, without access to that kind of protection, that certainly impacted the number of people who are trying to cross the border,” Putzel-Kavanaugh told us.

In addition, Trump abolished the so-called “catch and release” policy, such that people apprehended at the border are processed for expedited removal or placed in detention, rather than some, such as those seeking asylum, being released into the U.S. pending an immigration hearing.

That is what Trump was apparently referring to in a speech at a Turning Point USA event on April 17, when he said he had taken an “open border and created the most secure border in U.S. history, one of the most secure borders anywhere in the world with zero illegal aliens coming into our country in the past 11 months. Zero.”

But, Putzel-Kavanaugh said, because “people are just immediately processed for removal,” it’s also possible things are returning to the “standard migration pattern” where people are seeking to evade detection.

One other major factor in the decrease in illegal immigration to the U.S. has been the Trump administration’s focus on interior enforcement and deportations, which, Putzel-Kavanaugh told us, “likely has somewhat of a chilling factor for people who maybe were thinking about coming to the US.”

According to publicly available Immigration and Customs Enforcement data, the average daily population of those detained by ICE during the first three months of 2026 is up nearly 300% compared with the last three months under Biden. The Trump administration is also arresting a greater percentage of people who have neither criminal convictions nor pending criminal charges. In the last three months of the Biden administration, 65% of those detained by ICE had criminal convictions and 29% had pending criminal charges. Just 6% had neither. By contrast, in the first three months of 2026, 30% of those detained by ICE had criminal convictions and 31% had pending charges. The percentage of those detained by ICE with neither criminal convictions nor pending charges was 39%.

Refugees 

In Trump’s second term, refugee admissions have all but stopped – except for South Africa’s white minority Afrikaners. 

As we wrote last year, Trump signed an executive order on his first day back in office that called for an indefinite suspension of all refugee admissions until the program “aligns with the interests of the United States.” 

But Trump issued an order on Feb. 7, 2025, making an exception for Afrikaners. When asked about the exception, the president told reporters there was “a genocide that’s taking place” against white farmers in the country – which, as we wrote, distorts the facts.  

Since February 2025, the U.S. admitted only 5,005 refugees in Trump’s first full 14 months in office – including 4,838 refugees from South Africa, according to the State Department’s monthly refugee admissions reports.  

That’s an average of 357.5 per month, or 92.5% fewer than the monthly average of 4,741 per month under Biden.

For fiscal year 2026, which began Oct. 1, 2025, Trump capped refugee admissions at just 7,500. In the first six months of the current fiscal year, the Trump administration has resettled 4,499 refugees and all but three came from South Africa. 

Health Insurance

Data on how health insurance coverage has changed under Trump’s second term is slowly being released. In late January, the National Health Interview Survey published a preliminary report on the first six months of 2025 that found no change in the percentage of the population lacking health insurance, compared with the full-year report for 2024.

For January to June 2025, 8.2% of the U.S. population was uninsured, the same figure as the prior year. In raw numbers, 27.5 million people lacked insurance in the first half of 2025, a figure that “was not significantly different” from the 27.2 million who lacked insurance in 2024, the report said. The NHIS measures the uninsured at the time people are interviewed.

The NHIS, a project of the National Center for Health Statistics at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, used to release quarterly preliminary reports, but as of last year, it said it would switch to biannual reports only. A full-year report for 2025 is scheduled to be published in June.

Annual reports from the Census Bureau, typically released in September, measure those who were uninsured for the entire calendar year. The report for 2024, the latest available, similarly put the uninsured rate at 8%.

The 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act is expected to increase the number of people who lack health insurance, but the impact will occur over several years. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated the uninsured would increase by 10 million people over 10 years, with most of the increase due to the law’s changes to Medicaid. For 2026, the rise was estimated at 1.3 million people. (See the link to estimated changes in people without health insurance.)

Trade

The latest figures from the Bureau of Economic Analysis show that the U.S. trade deficit in goods and services may be headed for a decrease in 2026 after rising in 2025.

During the most recent 12 months ending in February, the U.S. imported about $775.6 billion more in goods and services than it exported. That trade gap was down 14.15% from the annual trade deficit of $903.5 billion in 2024.

The trade deficit rose to almost $911.7 billion in 2025, which was influenced by larger than usual monthly deficits in January, February and March of last year. As we have written, those three monthly deficits — all above $100 billion — were the result of U.S. importers stocking up on goods to get ahead of a number of tariffs on imported products that Trump had said he planned to implement.

Trump claimed that his tariffs would help reduce, or even eliminate, the trade deficit, which had increased by 34.1% under Biden.

Crime

Violent crime has declined. The latest data comes from several groups that monitor crime statistics. The FBI’s annual nationwide report for 2025 won’t be released until the fall.

AH Datalytics, an independent criminal justice data analysis group, documents an 11% drop in the number of violent crimes from 2024 to 2025, based on data from 445 law enforcement agencies across the country covering nearly a third of the U.S. population. Murders declined 17.9%, and robberies were down 19.2%. The number of property crimes decreased 12.2%. The number of violent and property crimes continued to go down in January and February, compared with those months last year.

AH Datalytics’ charts on the longer-term trend show an increase in the number of murders starting in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, and a decline in the numbers since 2022.

The Major Cities Chiefs Association, an organization representing police executives in large cities, similarly found a 19.3% decrease in the number of homicides and a 19.8% drop in the number of robberies in 2025, compared with 2024. That’s based on data from 67 law enforcement agencies.

The Council on Criminal Justice, a nonprofit think tank, found similar percentage decreases among 35 U.S. cities from 2024 to 2025. Its year-end report, released in January, said that when the FBI publishes nationwide data later this year, “there is a strong possibility that homicides in 2025 will drop to about 4.0 per 100,000 residents. That would be the lowest rate ever recorded in law enforcement or public health data going back to 1900, and would mark the largest single-year percentage drop in the homicide rate on record.” The existing historic low is a rate of 4.4 per 100,000 population in 2014.

“The overall reduction in crime, especially homicide, is welcome news,” Ernesto Lopez, lead author of the report and a CCJ senior research specialist, said in a press release. “While the big story here is that homicide saw the largest one-year increase [in 2020] and the largest one-year decrease in a short period of time, we should not forget that homicides had been steadily dropping since the late 2000s. It is possible that these rates reflect a longer-term downward trend punctuated by periods of elevated homicides.”

CCJ also published comments from several criminal justice experts on what might be driving the recent decline in homicides. “Researchers and practitioners have pointed to a range of possible contributors, including changes in criminal justice policy and practice, shifts in routine activities and social behavior, economic conditions, technology use, and local violence prevention efforts,” the group said.

Corporate Profits

Corporate profits have set records every year since 2015. The streak continued last year under Trump, but at a slower rate. 

The Bureau of Economic Analysis reported that after-tax corporate profits hit a record $3.51 trillion in 2025, but that was just 0.6% higher than the previous year. (See the chart below.)

Under Biden, the annual average growth in profits was 31% in 2021, 3.8% in 2022, 7.8% in 2023 and 7.9% in 2024, according to BEA data. 

The estimate of first quarter profits for this year will be released May 28.

Stock Market

It’s been a turbulent ride for the stock market since we wrote the first “Trump’s Numbers” piece of this term on Jan. 20. Stock prices fell dramatically after the U.S. and Israel began airstrikes on Iran starting in late February, and Iran retaliated by blocking the Strait of Hormuz, an important waterway for international trade. But with subsequent peace talks amid a fragile ceasefire, the stock market has rebounded and again reached new heights, just as it had under Biden.

The S&P 500, which is made up of 500 large-cap companies, closed at roughly 19% higher on April 22 than it was three days before Trump’s inauguration in January 2025.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average, made up of 30 large corporations, was up 13.8% over that same period.

Meanwhile, the Nasdaq composite index, comprising more than 3,000 companies, many in the technology sector, surged by almost 25.6% between Jan. 17, 2025, and April 22.

The gains under Trump have come after substantial increases during the Biden administration, when the S&P rose 57.8%, the Dow Jones went up 40.6%, and the Nasdaq increased by almost half.

Oil Production and Imports

Crude oil production in the U.S. averaged roughly 13.6 million barrels per day during Trump’s most recent 12 months in office (ending in January), according to Energy Information Administration data published in late March. That was 2.7% higher than the average daily amount of crude oil produced in 2024.

The 13.6 million barrels produced each day in 2025 set a new U.S. record, exceeding the previous high of more than 13.2 million barrels produced daily in 2024. The EIA said that even with “less rig activity and fewer wells” in 2025, “efficiency improvements that we saw in 2024 continued through 2025 and resulted in a slight increase in crude oil production.”

However, in its Short-Term Energy Outlook for April, the EIA reported that it expects production to dip slightly in 2026 — to 13.5 million barrels per day — before increasing again in 2027.

Meanwhile, crude oil imports are down under Trump — dropping to about 6.15 million barrels imported on average each day in his first full year in office of his second term. In that time, imports fell almost 6.6% from the daily average in 2024. But the U.S. is expected to remain a net importer of crude oil in 2026, according to the EIA.

Carbon Emissions

The latest EIA data still show a slight increase in U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from energy consumption under Trump.

In his first 11 months (ending in December), there were more than 4.4 billion metric tons of emissions from the use of coal, natural gas and petroleum-based products. That was 2% more than the over 4.3 billion metric tons that were emitted from consuming those energy sources over the same stretch in 2024.

However, as of April, the EIA’s outlook was that energy-related CO2 emissions would fall in 2026, by about 2.4%, to roughly 4.8 billion metric tons — down from just over 4.9 billion in 2025. The 2026 total, if the EIA estimate holds, would be almost exactly the same as the amount of CO2 emitted in 2024. The agency said the expected drop this year is “due primarily to expected declines in coal consumption” at electricity-generating power plants.

Food Stamps

Early data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture show that the number of people accessing benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps, has declined under Trump.

As of December, the most recent month for which preliminary USDA figures are available, about 39.5 million people were participating in SNAP. The number has dropped further since our last update in January and is down by more than 3.3 million, or about 7.7%, since Trump took office in January 2025.

The decline in SNAP participants was expected because of the Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which changed eligibility requirements for nutrition assistance and is estimated to reduce federal spending on the program. For example, the law extends work requirements to include “able-bodied adults without dependents” aged 55 to 64, who were previously exempt.

The CBO estimated in August that provisions in the law “will reduce participation in SNAP by roughly 2.4 million people in an average month over the 2025-2034 period.”

Debt and Deficits

Debt — Since our last update, the public debt, which excludes money the government owes itself, has risen. It increased by more than $505 billion to over $31.3 trillion, as of April 21. The public debt is up about 8.6% under Trump. It increased by one-third on Biden’s watch.

Deficits — The debt continues to increase mostly due to large annual budget deficits. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the deficit so far for fiscal year 2026 is lower than it was at this point in fiscal 2025, when the annual deficit was almost $1.8 trillion.

Through the first half of the current fiscal year (October to March), the deficit was about $1.2 trillion, or “$139 billion less than the deficit recorded during the same period last fiscal year,” the CBO reported in its latest Monthly Budget Review. But as of February, the CBO projected that the deficit for FY 2026 would rise to nearly $1.9 trillion for the year.

Judiciary Appointments

Supreme Court — There hasn’t been a vacancy on the Supreme Court during Trump’s second term. At this point in his presidency, Biden had won confirmation for one justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson, which occurred on April 7, 2022. 

Court of Appeals — As of April 22, six of Trump’s nominees to the U.S. Court of Appeals had been approved. At the same point in his term, Biden had won confirmation for 15.

District Court — Trump also has had 31 nominees confirmed to be District Court judges, while 43 were confirmed by this time in Biden’s tenure.

By this point, two U.S. Court of Federal Claims judges also were confirmed under Biden. None have been confirmed so far under Trump, and there are no such positions currently available.

As of April 22, there were no vacancies for Court of Appeals judges, 33 for District Court judges with nine nominees pending, and one vacancy for the international trade court with a single nominee pending.

Sources

We provide links to the sources for these statistics throughout the article.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, P.O. Box 58100, Philadelphia, PA 19102. 

The post Trump’s Numbers, April 2026 Update appeared first on FactCheck.org.

We’re honored to have won the 2026 Webby People’s Voice Award in the category for Websites and Mobile Sites: News & Politics. Thank you to our loyal readers and social media followers who voted for us.

FactCheck.org has now won 12 People’s Voice Awards, dating back to 2007.

The Webby Awards have been presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences since 1996. This year’s winners will be honored in a May 11 event in New York City.

We did not win this year’s Webby Award in News & Politics that is chosen by a panel of judges (we have won the judges’ award 10 times in the past). The Trace, which reports on the issue of gun violence in the U.S., took home the 2026 prize. The other nominees in our category were the Council on Foreign Relations; Reuters, for its coverage of Syria after the fall of the Assad regime; and the SLAPP Back Initiative, a project based at New York University that tracks so-called SLAPP lawsuits targeting First Amendment expression.

Thanks again to our readers for their support. Now, we need to work on our 5-Word Speech, a hallmark of the Webbys.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, P.O. Box 58100, Philadelphia, PA 19102. 

The post We Won a Webby People’s Voice Award appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Q: How real is birth tourism?

A: The government doesn’t provide estimates of the extent of so-called birth tourism — pregnant women coming to the U.S. on tourism visas in order to obtain birthright U.S. citizenship for their newborn child. One outside group has estimated it may be more than 20,000 births per year. Some argue it’s not common enough to justify upending longstanding birthright citizenship policies.

FULL ANSWER

As the reader who asked us about this noted, birth tourism was cited by the solicitor general in Supreme Court arguments on April 1 as a reason why birthright citizenship ought to be ended. According to longstanding interpretation, the U.S. Constitution grants citizenship to children born in the U.S. even if their parents are in the country illegally. The Trump administration is challenging that.

Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued before the Supreme Court that birthright citizenship “has spawned a sprawling industry of birth tourism as uncounted thousands of foreigners from potentially hostile nations have flocked to give birth in the United States in recent decades, creating a whole generation of American citizens abroad with no meaningful ties to the United States.”

When asked by Chief Justice John Roberts if he had any information about how common or significant a problem birth tourism is, Sauer responded, “No one knows for sure.”

The high court is expected to rule this summer on the case challenging President Donald Trump’s executive order to end birthright citizenship, which he issued on the first day of his second term.

The State Department does not keep data on birth tourism. But that hasn’t stopped the Trump administration from sharing high-end estimates.

Trump has long criticized birth tourism, saying it is a magnet for illegal immigration. In 2023, he proposed an executive order that he said would “end their unfair practice known as birth tourism where hundreds of thousands of people from all over the planet squat in hotels for their last few weeks of pregnancy to illegitimately and illegally obtain U.S. citizenship for the child, often to later exploit chain migration to jump the line and get green cards for themselves and their family members.” (What he signed in 2025, however, went beyond targeting birth tourism and called for an end to birthright citizenship for any child born in the U.S. to parents who aren’t citizens or legal permanent residents.)  

On Fox News on April 4, Border Czar Tom Homan said, “Birth tourism has been a problem for the three decades that I’ve been enforcing immigration law, especially from Russia and China, where hundreds of thousands of their nationals come to this country just to give birth. So we’ve got hundreds of thousands of Chinese nationals and Russian nationals who have U.S. citizen children. And if that continues, that is a significant national security threat.”

In 2020, the Center for Immigration Studies, an organization that advocates low immigration, estimated the possible number of birth tourism cases at 20,000 to 26,000 per year. For context, there were 3.61 million births in the U.S. that year.

Steven Camarota, director of research for CIS, said he arrived at the estimate by comparing census data with birth records. Due to some changes in the census data, he said, the 2020 estimate is the most recent he can provide. But over a decade, he said, that would be an estimate of more than 200,000 birth tourism cases.

Birth Tourism Operations

In his Supreme Court arguments, Sauer cited a 2022 congressional report from Republicans on the Senate’s Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs that detailed two birth tourism operations: one that solicited clients in China and operated out of California and another that catered to “Russian elites coming to Miami through these birth tourism companies.”

Sauer also noted that in 2015, a Chinese newspaper reported that at least 500 companies offered “birth tourism” services in China at that time.

In 2019, federal authorities announced the first federal case involving birth tourism, with the arrest of three people for running an operation in Southern California catering to Chinese clients. The indictments, which came following an undercover operation in 2015, also included an additional 16 fugitive defendants.

“The indictments describe birth tourism schemes in which foreign nationals, mostly from China, applied for visitor visas to come to the United States and lied about the length of their trips, where they would stay, and the purposes of their trips – which were to come to the U.S. for three months to give birth so their children would receive U.S. birthright citizenship,” according to a U.S. Attorney’s Office press release at the time.

The press release said the operators coached pregnant Chinese customers about “how to pass the U.S. Consulate interview in China by falsely stating that they were going to stay in the U.S. for only two weeks. Their clients were also coached to trick U.S. Customs at ports of entry by wearing loose clothing that would conceal their pregnancies. … The indictments allege that many of the Chinese birth tourism customers failed to pay all of the medical costs associated with their hospital births, and the debts were referred to collection.”

“Receiving a tourist visa from the United States Government is a privilege, not a right,” IRS Criminal Investigation Acting Special Agent in Charge Bryant Jackson stated at the time.

One of the operations in the indictment purported to have a “100-person team” in China and to have served more than 500 Chinese birth tourism customers. The operation used an array of apartments in California and charged customers between $40,000 to $80,000. Another, which was believed to be the largest birth tourism operation, claimed it “provided services to 8,000 pregnant women (4,000 from China) since we established.”

In an interview on Fox News in January, Peter Schweizer, author of the book “The Invisible Coup: How American Elites and Foreign Powers Use Immigration as a Weapon,” said China had “created an industrial model to exploit birthright citizenship.”

“Our federal government has no idea how many Chinese nationals have done this,” Schweizer said, because the U.S. does not compile birth certificate data on the nationality of parents. “So our federal government has no clue.”

Schweizer claimed Chinese officials estimated as many as 100,000 Chinese babies have been born each year in the U.S. over the last 13 years.

Republican legislators have also raised concerns about the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, a 14-island U.S. territory in the Western Pacific, being used as a birth tourism hub. Since it’s a U.S. territory, those born in the Northern Mariana Islands are granted citizenship.

In a Jan. 15 letter to the departments of Homeland Security and the Interior, Sens. Rick Scott, Jim Banks and Markwayne Mullin argued that President Barack Obama had paved the way for birth tourism with a parole program in 2009 that enabled Chinese nationals to visit the Northern Mariana Islands without a tourist visa.

“Birth tourism has long been an underground industry in the CNMI, with pregnant Chinese women flocking to Saipan to give birth that automatically provides U.S. citizenship to their new-born child,” the Pacific Island Times reported on Dec. 5, 2017. “Most of these women leave the CNMI after childbirth and receipt of their baby’s U.S. passport.”

Births registered to foreign tourists in the Northern Mariana Islands reached a peak of 581 in 2018, the New York Times reported.

That year, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands reported the conviction of a man for operating an illegal birth tourism business on Saipan, the capital of the Northern Mariana Islands. A press release said the man — who was sentenced to a year in jail — said he had employed “dozens of caretakers, or ‘nannies’, all Chinese nationals who were in the CNMI without work authorization.”

Kimberlyn King-Hinds, a Republican who serves as a non-voting delegate for CNMI in the U.S. House of Representatives, told NPR that local and federal officials have since cracked down on the practice and tightened border security. By 2025, she said, births to foreign tourists had dropped to 47. (That figure was also confirmed by the New York Times.)

Federal Policies

In 2020, the Trump administration issued a new rule giving the State Department discretion to deny tourism visas to an applicant it has “reason to believe intends to travel for this primary purpose [birth tourism].”

According to the 2022 minority report from the Senate’s Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, the “rule change made it more difficult for birth tourism companies to continue operations.”

Camarota said the rule change may have encouraged federal authorities to be more diligent in scrutinizing people seeking tourism visas. But he believes there is more the government could do — such as barring travel visas to people who appear to be obviously pregnant.

“Birth tourism is an issue, there is no doubt,” Michelle Mittelstadt, director of communications and public affairs at the Migration Policy Institute, told us via email. “It is visa fraud and a misuse of the U.S. immigration system.”

According to U.S. law, when people come to the U.S. on tourism visas for pleasure, that “does not include obtaining a visa for the primary purpose of obtaining U.S. citizenship for a child by giving birth in the United States.”

“That said, birth tourism is a very small occurrence – of the 3.6 million U.S. births annually, a tiny fraction is due to foreign women who are not regularly domiciled in the U.S. coming here for the purpose of giving birth to secure U.S. citizenship for their child,” Mittelstadt said.

In 2024, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 9,576 births in the U.S. to foreign residents. Mittelstadt acknowledges that the CDC figures may be an undercount of birth tourism, and that many women may list a U.S. address even if they are not intending to live in the U.S. after giving birth.

“Still, even the most expansive estimates of birth tourism … [from CIS] puts the total at a max 26,000 births a year,” Mittelstadt said.

“There are effective ways to address birth tourism without watering down constitutional protections and both expanding the size of the unauthorized population and creating a category of second-class individuals as would occur if birthright citizenship is ended,” Mittelstadt said.

For example, Mittelstadt said, the government could tighten consular and border screenings, including “rigorous questioning about purpose of travel and financial arrangements for medical care. And making travel primarily for giving birth in the U.S. an explicit ground for inadmissibility or visitor visa denial.” In addition, she said, questions could be added to visa application forms “about pregnancy and intent to deliver in the U.S., with long-term or lifetime visa bans for those who engage in misrepresentations.” Regulations could also be put in place stipulating how late in pregnancy women can travel from international destinations to the U.S. And law enforcement could also prosecute birth tourism operators more vigorously.

Camarota agreed there are ways the U.S. could reduce birth tourism short of banning birthright citizenship.

“You probably can address a lot of it just by taking a forceful position,” Camarota said. “You couldn’t eliminate it, but … you probably could greatly curtail it with different State Department rules and different border controls.”

Camarota said he also wishes the administration had started with an executive order more narrowly targeting birth tourism, which he thinks might be more winnable at the Supreme Court.

“Birth tourism probably is the best case against automatic birthright citizenship,” Camarota said. “Most Americans, say, ‘Yeah, that doesn’t seem right at all.’ And I think that that’s probably where they should start.”

At the Supreme Court hearing on April 1 to consider abolishing birthright citizenship altogether, Chief Justice Roberts asked Sauer, the solicitor general, if he agreed that birth tourism “has no impact on the legal analysis before us.”

Sauer responded that birth tourism is an example that the 14th Amendment’s “interpretation has these implications that could not possibly have been approved by the 19th century framers of this amendment.”

Sauer noted that we now live in a world “where 8 billion people are one plane ride away from having a child who’s a U.S. citizen.”

“Well, it’s a new world,” Roberts said. “It’s the same Constitution.”

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, P.O. Box 58100, Philadelphia, PA 19102. 

The post What Do We Know About ‘Birth Tourism’? appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Elon Musk this week amplified an unfounded claim, based on a distortion of vaccine safety monitoring data, that COVID-19 vaccines killed tens of thousands of people in Germany. The vaccines saved millions of lives worldwide during a deadly pandemic, and serious side effects or deaths from vaccination are rare.

Despite this well-established safety record, Musk questioned COVID-19 vaccine safety on X on April 12 while sharing a post from far-right Swedish influencer Peter Imanuelsen, who also goes by PeterSweden. Musk, a former Trump adviser who is CEO of SpaceX and Tesla and owns X, has previously amplified and interacted with Imanuelsen’s posts on multiple occasions. Musk’s post had nearly 60 million views as of this story’s publication, and Imanuelsen’s had 64 million.

“A Pfizer insider who was former head of toxicology in Europe has just come out and said something that many ‘conspiracy theorists’ suspected,” Imanuelsen wrote in his April 12 post. “He estimates that 20 000 to 60 000 people in Germany have died from the c*vid vaccine,” he continued, adding that it “should be headline news EVERYWHERE.”

There is no evidence this large number of deaths occurred. Nor did COVID-19 vaccines cause mass deaths in general, as we have written multiple times.

Imanuelsen’s post was based on March 19 testimony at a German parliamentary hearing from Dr. Helmut Sterz, a toxicologist and veterinarian who reported formerly working for Pfizer. Sterz, who appeared at the invitation of a far-right party, baselessly claimed that the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine killed 60,000 people in Germany. But Sterz arrived at this number by distorting German vaccine safety monitoring data, following logic also common to anti-vaccine activists in the U.S. who have misused similar passive surveillance data. (Imanuelsen explained on X that Sterz had also given the 20,000 figure after the hearing, but we were unable to locate these further comments.)

Dr. Mahmoud Zureik, a professor of epidemiology and public health at University of Paris-Saclay in France, told us via email that Sterz’s claim “confuses coincidence with causation, misuses passive surveillance data, and is not supported by the best available scientific evidence.” Sterz counted deaths reported after vaccination that were not necessarily related to the vaccines and then multiplied them by 30 to purportedly account for underreporting. Zureik called the use of this factor of 30 “arbitrary.” Zureik is director of EPI-PHARE, a scientific organization created by French health authorities to independently advise on health product safety.

Zureik added that the idea that COVID-19 vaccines have caused large numbers of deaths is inconsistent with the scientific literature. “More broadly, large epidemiologic studies have not shown an excess risk of overall mortality after COVID-19 mRNA vaccination,” he said. 

Pfizer spokesperson Andrew Widger told us via email that the company’s COVID-19 vaccine “continues to demonstrate a favourable safety and efficacy profile supported by extensive real-world evidence as well as by clinical, non-clinical, pharmacovigilance, and manufacturing data.“

A LinkedIn profile lists Sterz as having held a leadership role at a Pfizer research center in France from 2001 to 2009. He is author of a 2025 book about COVID-19 whose title translates to “The Vaccination Mafia,” and whose subheading describes him as Pfizer’s former chief toxicologist. He does not appear to have any recent scientific publications.

Pfizer as a policy doesn’t “provide details regarding individuals,” the company’s spokesperson said, “but I can confirm the individual you mention was not working at Pfizer during the pandemic or during the decade preceding it, and consequently had no involvement in the development of the COVID-19 vaccine. I would question therefore whether he could be described as an ‘insider.’” 

Misuse of German Vaccine Safety Surveillance Data

In the U.S., anti-vaccine activists often distort data from the ​​government-run Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, which collects unverified reports of health problems following vaccination in order to identify possible safety signals. Sterz’s unfounded claim about vaccine deaths in Germany relies on misuse of a similar government system in Germany, run by the Paul Ehrlich Institute, which we have also written about before.

During his testimony, Sterz said that PEI had gotten 2,133 reports of death after vaccination with Pfizer/BioNTech’s vaccine. There were indeed 2,133 reports of deaths following vaccination with the original Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine through the end of 2024, according to a 2024 PEI report.

However, Zureik said that a death or other problem happening after vaccination “is not, by itself, evidence that the vaccine caused the event,” explaining that systems such as the PEI one “are designed to detect signals that then necessarily require clinical and epidemiological assessment.”

“It is not valid to presume the 2000 reported deaths were caused by vaccines, much less to presume that there were 30x this number to arrive at the 60k number the person claims,” Jeffrey S. Morris, director of the division of biostatistics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, told us via email. Morris wrote a December 2025 Annenberg Public Policy Center white paper on vaccine safety monitoring, including a section explaining how VAERS functions and is distorted. (FactCheck.org is a project of APPC.)

People die on a regular basis, including 1 million per year in Germany, Morris and Zureik both noted. “Therefore, when tens of millions of people are vaccinated, some deaths will inevitably occur in the days, weeks or months following vaccination purely by coincidence, including deaths that would also have occurred in the absence of vaccination,” Zureik said.

The PEI report also said that the occurrence of deaths or other events near the time of vaccination “does not automatically indicate that there is a causal relationship” between the two, explaining that in many cases, “the event can be explained by other factors, such as pre-existing conditions, comorbidities, or concomitant medications.” In other cases, there is limited information available. Of the 2,133 reports of deaths after receiving the original Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, PEI assessed 28 as having a “possible or probable” causal relationship with vaccination. The report said more than 138 million doses of the vaccine had been given.

Unsupported Use of ‘Underreporting Factor‘

Sterz again followed a familiar pattern in multiplying an already-inflated number of deaths alleged to have been caused by COVID-19 vaccination by an “underreporting factor” of 30, which he said was used in the U.S.

American anti-vaccine advocates indeed multiply purported vaccine deaths or vaccine side effects by various factors, with Dr. Peter McCullough, for instance, often mentioning an underreporting factor of 30. McCullough is a cardiologist with a long history of spreading incorrect information about vaccines.

But as we have written before, the approach of applying an underreporting factor to reports from VAERS to identify the “true” rate of a problem is flawed. There is both underreporting and overreporting of events, and it’s not straightforward to identify a specific underreporting rate, which will vary depending on what events someone is looking at and the context in which a vaccine was given.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Zureik explained, it’s possible that there was in fact “overreporting driven by what is known as notoriety bias (or stimulated reporting).” In other words, the widespread attention to COVID-19 vaccination and possible side effects may have led people to be more likely to report deaths that happened near the time of vaccination, regardless of any causal relationship. 

“Therefore, applying a fixed ‘underreporting factor’ is not only unsupported but also ignores the possibility of reporting inflation in this context,” Zureik said.

Reassuring Data on COVID-19 Vaccine Safety

Regardless, there are other types of studies used to further investigate any safety signals found by surveillance systems like VAERS or the PEI system, Morris said. These sorts of studies looked at deaths after COVID-19 vaccination and have shown “no evidence of increased risk of death,” he said.

In the U.S., a 2022 study of nearly 7 million people from the Vaccine Safety Datalink monitoring system found that people who received COVID-19 vaccines were less likely to die than those who did not get the vaccines, after matching people by various characteristics and following them over at least two months. VSD is a U.S. health care record-based system that can be used to follow up on safety signals identified in VAERS. “This is far stronger evidence than any VAERs analysis,” Morris said.

Zureik and his colleagues in France, meanwhile, looked at French health records from 28 million adults age 59 and under to investigate whether COVID-19 vaccination had any association with death from all causes over a four-year period. Their study, published in December 2025, again found that vaccinated people were less likely to die than those who were unvaccinated.

Morris explained that these studies and others from around the world don’t necessarily mean that vaccination decreases risk of death from causes other than COVID-19, since people who get vaccinated may have other characteristics that make them healthier. However, the research indicates that COVID-19 vaccines are not associated with any increased risk of dying, contrary to claims about large-scale lethality.

People have expressed particular concern about spikes in sudden deaths caused by vaccination, despite a lack of evidence for such a phenomenon. This is partly based on the real but rare side effect of myocarditis, or inflammation of the heart. Some COVID-19 vaccines, including the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, caused this condition, which most often affected adolescent or young adult males after the second dose of the original series. Myocarditis after COVID-19 vaccination is generally less severe than after infection and resolves relatively quickly, although it is possible that it has caused deaths in some very small number of cases, as we’ve written previously.

But again, studies do not show a pattern of increased deaths in adolescents and young adults after vaccination, either from heart-related or other causes. Most recently, a March 19 Canadian study investigated whether COVID-19 vaccination in adolescents and young adults without documented heart disease was associated with sudden cardiac death, which can be caused by various conditions, including myocarditis.

The researchers found that vaccinated people were less likely to have sudden cardiac deaths than unvaccinated people. “These findings do not support the hypothesis that COVID-19 vaccines increase the risk of sudden cardiac death in young healthy adults,” the authors concluded.

Update, April 24: After publication, a spokesperson for the Paul Ehrlich Institute told us via email that there is “no evidence” for the claim that the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine killed 60,000 people in Germany. The spokesperson called the 2,133 reported deaths cited by Sterz an “inappropriate basis for such an estimate,” given that they were not confirmed to have been caused by vaccination. The spokesperson also objected to applying a “fixed underreporting factor” to the reported deaths, saying that the “data basis for such a calculation is lacking,” and that PEI “takes various underreporting scenarios into account” when monitoring for safety signals. The European Medicines Agency — the agency that authorized the vaccines in areas of Europe — also has said there’s “no evidence of an increase in deaths related to COVID-19 vaccination.”

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, P.O. Box 58100, Philadelphia, PA 19102. 

The post Elon Musk Amplifies Baseless Claim About COVID-19 Vaccine appeared first on FactCheck.org.

An online ad attacks Rep. Seth Moulton, a Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts, for not being sufficiently progressive because of past policy positions. But it also misleadingly claims that Moulton, a critic of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, “thanked ICE as they were terrorizing our communities and then killed citizens.”

The claim about ICE is based on Moulton’s vote for a June 2025 House resolution condemning a terrorist attack at a pro-Israel demonstration in Boulder, Colorado, that month. The last sentence of the resolution acknowledged law enforcement, including ICE officers, “for protecting the homeland.” 

However, at the time of his vote, Moulton said in a statement that he supported the measure because its “overarching purpose” was to “condemn antisemitic terror.”

The ad also criticizes Moulton, who was first elected to the House in 2015, for finding fault with the Green New Deal, an environmental policy agenda that he has supported; for previously opposing a wealth tax on billionaires that he now supports; and for not completely embracing proposals for a Medicare-for-all health care system for the U.S., which Moulton has said should be optional for Americans rather than mandatory.

Commonwealth Together PAC released the 30-second ad, titled “Run,” on April 8. The super PAC is pushing for the reelection of Sen. Ed Markey, the longtime incumbent whom Moulton is challenging in the Democratic primary. The election is Sept. 1.

A spokesman for the super PAC told the Boston Globe that the ad cost “six figures” and will run on social media and streaming platforms for “several weeks.”

“Sorry, Seth. You can run for Senate, but you can’t run from your record,” the narrator says at the end of the ad. A reader asked us if the ad’s claims about Moulton are accurate.

Thanking ICE?

The ad starts with the narrator saying: “Now that Seth Moulton is running for Senate, he claims he’s a progressive. But Moulton voted with Republicans to thank ICE for protecting our homeland. He thanked ICE as they were terrorizing our communities and then killed citizens in broad daylight.”

The ad cites Moulton’s vote in June 2025 for a House resolution — introduced by Republican Rep. Gabe Evans of Colorado — that denounced Mohammed Sabry Soliman, an Egyptian national, “and his antisemitic terrorist attack on peaceful demonstrators supporting the release of the hostages held by Hamas.” Federal prosecutors have charged Soliman, who is in the country on an expired tourist visa, with using Molotov cocktails and a homemade flamethrower to assault multiple demonstrators at that pro-Israel rally on June 1.

The last line of the roughly two-page resolution, which passed 280 to 113, with 75 Democrats joining 205 Republicans, said the House “expresses gratitude to law enforcement officers, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel, for protecting the homeland.”

But that acknowledgement of ICE is not why Moulton said he voted for the resolution, as the ad may lead viewers to believe.

In a June 11 statement responding to Democrats angered by his vote, Moulton said: “It is important to recognize that there rarely exists a bill or resolution that I vote for because I agree with every single word in it. At the end of the day, I cast my vote for H. Res 488 because I believe that it is critical to loudly condemn antisemitic terror, which was the overarching purpose of this resolution.” 

Moulton noted that he also voted for a second resolution condemning the attack in Boulder that did not mention ICE. He went on to say in his statement that he would oppose President Donald Trump’s “desires to weaponize ICE and create a culture of fear in immigrant communities across the country” while also “loudly condemning antisemitism.” Democrats should do both, Moulton said. 

And the congressman has criticized ICE several times since his vote last spring.

After Renee Good, a U.S. citizen, was shot and killed during a dispute with ICE agents in Minneapolis on Jan. 7, Moulton called for the Department of Homeland Security and then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem to be held accountable “for aggressive and illicit tactics by ICE and other law enforcement agencies” that contributed to Good’s death. He said the killing of Good was an example of why he had introduced legislation in December “to make sure ICE officers can be prosecuted when they break the law.” That bill, the National Oversight and Enforcement of Misconduct Act, or NOEM Act, has not advanced.

In addition, after federal immigration officers in Minneapolis fatally shot Alex Pretti, another U.S. citizen, on Jan. 24, Moulton posted a social media video in which he called for ICE to be abolished. (A clip of the scuffle between Pretti and the officers is shown in the ad.)

“ICE is beyond repair,” Moulton said in his video post. “It obviously needs to be abolished, but even more urgently, its gang of criminal enforcers needs to be prosecuted. And then we can build a more comprehensive and humane immigration system that, No. 1, incentivizes people to come here legally, not illegally; two, provides a very clear pathway to citizenship; and three, is guarded by an enforcement system that, from judges to officers on the streets, reflects American values in every action and policy.” 

That same month, Moulton co-authored a letter to the leaders of a congressional subcommittee on homeland security that said he would oppose any DHS appropriations bill “without firm statutory guardrails and meaningful reforms” for ICE.

“To suggest that a vote to condemn a horrific terrorist attack against Holocaust survivors was somehow an endorsement of ICE is the kind of intellectual dishonesty that makes people lose faith in politics,” Moulton’s campaign said in an April 8 statement responding to the ad attacking him.

Other Ad Claims

Immediately following the ICE claims, the ad’s narrator says, “Moulton opposes Medicare-for-all too.” A graphic on screen in the ad cites a May 8, 2019, article on boston.com that carried the headline “Here’s why Seth Moulton opposes Medicare-for-All.”

The article went on to say that Moulton, a former Marine with health coverage through the Veterans Administration, had reservations about “forcing everyone onto a government one-size-fits-all program” like the VA system because of his own health care experiences.

“I can tell you plenty of stories about how my health care at the VA, with this socialized government system, is not great,” the article quoted him as telling CNN.

But the boston.com article also said that Moulton was fine with giving people the option to choose Medicare-style health insurance. Medicare “should be an option that Americans have. But it shouldn’t be the only way to go,” the article quoted him as saying on the “Pod Save America” podcast in April 2019, during his brief run for president. 

As he suggested during that podcast interview, Moulton’s current health care platform on his campaign website calls for creating a “National Public Option health care plan that competes directly with private insurers and lowers premiums for everyone.”

The ad attacking Moulton also says, “He criticized the Green New Deal, and he said Sen. Warren’s tax on billionaires punished the rich.”

The 2019 Los Angeles Times article cited in the ad quoted Moulton talking about being one of the earliest supporters of the Green New Deal – a nonbinding resolution outlining ways to address climate change – when it was in its early stages in 2018. What he later criticized were additions to that environmental policy agenda that he did not believe were about climate change. He said those add-ons could cause the proposal to lose support.

“I was one of the first people to sign onto the Green New Deal, and I signed on so early that it was just an open framework,” Moulton said, according to the L.A. Times article. “But then when some of the proponents of the deal or some of the sponsors of it started adding things like a jobs guarantee, a bunch of socialist programs, I think that’s a huge mistake because I think it’s gonna result in the baby being thrown out with the bathwater because it’s not addressing climate change specifically.” 

However, in a statement sent to us, Taylor Hebble, communications director for the Moulton campaign, noted that the congressman “has been a cosponsor of every Green New Deal Resolution introduced in the House.” But none has passed. (Markey has sponsored Senate versions of the Green New Deal that also have not passed.)

As for the tax on billionaires that Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an independent, proposed in 2019, Moulton did tell Reuters in an April interview that year that he thought their tax plans were a form of economic punishment.

“While he agreed the wealthy ought to pay their share of taxes, Sanders and Warren wanted to ‘punish the rich,’ Moulton said, which he called un-American,” Reuters reported. 

But Hebble raised the fact that Moulton went on to co-sponsor the Billionaire Minimum Income Tax Act in 2022, supported the 2022 state Massachusetts Fair Share Amendment that levied an extra 4% tax on taxable income exceeding $1,000,000, and backed the Social Security 2100 Act introduced in 2023 to apply Social Security payroll taxes to earnings above $400,000.

Fast forward to 2026, and Moulton has proposed his own wealth tax as part of his “affordability agenda” for housing, health care and education. “The plan is fully paid for through a national wealth tax on mega-millionaires and by closing tax loopholes exploited by corporations and the ultra-wealthy,” Moulton’s campaign said in a December press release about his proposal.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, P.O. Box 58100, Philadelphia, PA 19102. 

The post An Attack Over ICE in the Massachusetts Democratic Senate Race appeared first on FactCheck.org.