South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of homeland security, got some heat for rattling off dubious statistics during her Senate confirmation hearing Friday.
Michigan Senator Gary Peters noted that the hearing had considered a “fair amount of political theater,” and reminded those listening that the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee endeavored to be a “fact-based committee.”
“We’ve heard a lot of numbers being thrown around here. And I don’t have time to go through and challenge those numbers, some of them we don’t even know where they came from,” Peters said. “I don’t think that’s helpful to the very important mission of confirm that you’re gonna be dealing with.”
“So, I hope that in the future that we’re actually dealing with facts. You’ve mentioned many times that you want to deal with facts, and real data. And again, we’ve heard a lot here that’s not real data. And we should not operate that way,” Peters said.
Peters’s comment, though not directed at any particular person, seemed to be a way to chastise those present for providing sourceless numbers about immigration—including Noem.
“President Trump was elected with a clear mandate,” Noem said in her opening statement. “He needs to achieve this mission because two-thirds of Americans support his immigration and border policies, including the majority of Hispanic Americans.”
But a post-election survey by the Public Religion Research Institute found that just 26 percent of Americans agreed that the U.S. military should put undocumented immigrants into internment camps until they can be deported, which is exactly Trump’s plan. Not even two-thirds of Republicans support such an extreme plot, only 46 percent. Not exactly a mandate.
Noem also rattled off a slate of numbers about immigration that didn’t seem totally sound, either.
“Over 13,000 murderers loose in this country that have come over that border. We have had almost 16,000 rapists and sexual assault perpetrators that are loose in this country right now. Four hundred eighty-five thousand-plus people have criminal convictions that are here in this country,” she insisted
Noem appears to have gotten her numbers from DHS’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but she is misstating some of the facts. In July, ICE reported that there were 13,000 immigrants who have been convicted of homicide, either in their home country or in the U.S., and 16,000 who are convicted of sexual assault but who were not currently in ICE detention. While Noem suggested that these individuals are “loose,” she failed to provide the essential caveat that they could already be in jail for their crimes, or not “prioritized” for detention by ICE itself.
The ICE report also stated that there were 425,431 undocumented immigrants outside of ICE detention who were convicted criminals, and an additional 222,141 with pending criminal charges—not “485,000-plus.”
Much of Noem’s hearing revolved around so-called “migrant crime,” as she insisted that undocumented immigrants had been allowed to get away with rape and murder under the Biden administration—something which is simply not true.
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