Donald Trump has declared a national emergency for a fake crisis at our southern border. His No. 1 sticking point is that undocumented immigrants are coming into our country and committing crime. More specifically, they are committing heinous, gang-related acts of murder, rape, and mayhem. The numbers and the data he cites in his speeches are not simply wrong: They do not exist. Even his own government and the agencies he claims to be getting his evidence from produce completely different facts than their bigot in chief. When Trump first began drumming up his fake border crisis months ago, he would throw around that “63,000 Americans have been killed since the 9/11 terrorist attacks by people who came to the U.S. illegally.”
Besides being a false statistic, it pales in comparison to the number of Americans killed by firearms—just last year. The New York Times reported in December that almost 40,000 Americans were killed by guns in 2017, a historic 50-year high. 2018 saw the worst year in school shootings that our country has on record. Just this February, The Trace and the Miami Herald released an accounting of children killed by guns since the Parkland, Florida, school shooting. Data collected by youth reporters found that almost 1,200 American children ages 0-18 were killed by guns in the last 12 months.
In December, the CDC reported that more than 70,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in 2017. That’s just one year. Trump’s fake 63,000 “Americans killed” number—WHICH IS A FAKE NUMBER—covers 17 years! There are reasons to declare a national emergency in order to give much-needed funds to American institutions, but those institutions should not build walls and imprison families. The American institiutions that need national support provide mental healthcare, education, training, and safety to some of our most desperate friends and loved ones. Whether it’s from gun violence, domestic violence, or addiction, we have real public health and safety issues in our country, and a make-believe wall isn’t simply racist and stupid, it’s a waste of much-needed resources.