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Donald Trump on Monday fielded questions from Fox News' Bret Baier, who confronted the former president on the classified document scandals, falsehoods about winning the 2020 election, and relationships with former staff.
Trump, who is seeking another White House term in 2024, joined Baier for a one-on-one interview during which he was grilled about the Department of Justice (DOJ) investigation into whether he mishandled classified documents after leaving office in 2021.
In an opening salvo, as he set ahead his policy agenda on immigration, Trump made a claim about the population heading across the southern border, saying that among them were patients from "insane asylums."
The Claim
In his interview with Bret Baier on Fox News, broadcast on Monday, July 19, 2023, Donald Trump said: "I'd close up the border because we can't have prisoners and people from mental institutions coming into our country.
"They're emptying out from all over the world, not just from the three or four countries we talk about, the neighboring countries, all over the world, they're coming into our country at levels we've never seen before, Bret, and we have to stop it.
"And they are emptying out their prisons, and they're emptying out their mental institutions and insane asylums into the U.S., and we're not a dumping ground."
The Facts
Donald Trump is well-known for sweeping generalizations of migrants, having previously claimed that "criminals," including "rapists and murderers and drug dealers," were taking advantage of the "totally open" border.
It appears he returned to characterizations with his "insane asylum" claim, which has repeatedly been debunked.
CNN and FactCheck.org both recently published fact checks about claims that unnamed countries were emptying "insane asylums" and "mental institutions." Both were unable to find any evidence to support Trump's claim.
CNN said that Trump's campaign was unable to provide any evidence showing that South American mental facilities had been emptied or featured any first-hand testimony from mental health facility staff. Requests it made to the Center for Immigration Studies and the Federation for American Immigration Reform did not mention these, either.
While a Trump spokesperson mentioned a report about the 1980 Mariel boatlift, in which a small percentage of people involved included mental health patients, it does not fit Trump's description of "emptying...insane asylum" nor is it in recent terms as he described it.
Trump does not mention any specific country but talks about "emptying...insane asylums" in support of tightening controls on the border.
Newsweek was unable to find reports of in-patient mental health facilities that had been "emptied" in South American nations recently, nor any evidence that tracked migration journeys of former mental health institution patients into the U.S.
A lack of thorough data on the mental health of migrants entering the U.S. does not help to support Trump's argument. Although mental health can influence a decision to deny entry, this is not what Trump spoke about.
Trump's interview quickly became a trending topic on social media, where numerous legal scholars criticized him over the interview, including his response to an audio recording in which he allegedly admitted to having a classified document prepared by the U.S. military.
"Mr. Trump's lawyers had to be cringing during that interview, and DOJ lawyers were no doubt taking notes," Bradley Moss, a national security attorney, told Newsweek. "Mr. Trump confessed to personally going through the boxes and had no explanation for why classified records from those boxes wound up in his personal desk. He placed himself at the scene of the retention and obstruction. This is the stuff of nightmares for a defense attorney."
Newsweek has reached out to a Trump representative via email for comment.
The Ruling
False.
The claim that people from "insane asylums" are being emptied from facilities and are migrating to the U.S. was presented without evidence.
Multiple investigations into Trump's claim did not find any supporting data or testimony to back his claim. Newsweek was also unable to find any recent stories about the emptying of in-patient mental health institutions that would support even the baseline premise of Trump's argument.
FACT CHECK BY Newsweek's Fact Check team
About the writer
Tom Norton is Newsweek's Fact Check reporter, based in London. His focus is reporting on misinformation and misleading information in ... Read more