The right’s newest false outrage centers on misrepresented federal data

A few days before the 2016 presidential election, a deeply weird mini-controversy emerged: Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton or her staff were maybe Satanists?

The path to that conclusion was a meandering and patchy one, as you would expect, involving a (probably willful) misinterpretation of an email released by WikiLeaks after having been stolen from Clinton’s campaign chairman by Russian hackers. Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and others suggested that a dinner invitation from a well-known contemporary artist was instead an evil ritual that perhaps informed the motives and ethics of the woman who would be president.

I think about that flare-up regularly because, while it seemed idiotic in the moment, it offered a glimpse of what was to follow. A month later, a man brought a rifle to a D.C. pizza joint because he believed there were children being trafficked out of its nonexistent basement. A few years later, the idea that an anonymous government official dubbed “Q” was predicting a war against rampant pedophilia ensnared tens of thousands of Americans (or more) in the QAnon movement. In each case, small, imaginary things were taken out of context and amplified through right-wing media outlets to be presented as huge threats. The “spirit cooking” email Jones highlighted was just a microcosm.

These were also just the most obviously ridiculous offshoots of a rampant pattern embraced by the Republican nominee for president. Few people, if any, have been as relentless as Donald Trump about picking out bits of information that are misrepresented as something catastrophic. Trump does it so often, in fact, that it has become something like background noise to his political career: the most powerful person in right-wing politics once again saying something false based on something he’s misrepresenting.

This weekend offered a good example of the pattern. Data obtained by Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Tex.) in response to a letter he had sent to the Department of Homeland Security was elevated by Trump (and across the broad galaxy of Trump-supporting voices) to suggest that President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris had invited thousands of killers to roam the U.S.

“According to this brand-new data, never seen before, over 13,099 convicted murderers have crossed the border and are free to roam and kill in our country. These are convicted murderers. These are people that were in jail,” Trump claimed at an event in Michigan. He added that he had been talking about this for “three years.”

“Thirteen thousand,” he asserted. “More than 13,000 convicted murderers have been let out of jail, and they’re roaming our streets, our country, all over.”

At an event in Wisconsin, he took the claim — and the fearmongering — further.

“Under Kamala Harris, more than 13,099 convicted murderers — so these are people that have gone through the system. They’re convicted or they’re in jails for life. Some are getting the death sentence, but instead of that, they’ve crossed a border,” he claimed. “They’ve been taken out by their countries and set free into the United States of America. So they’re free to kill again. Oh, they’ll kill. These are killers. These are killers that at a level that nobody’s ever seen, not even your great law enforcement has ever seen people like this. … They make our criminals look like babies. These are stone cold killers. They’ll walk into a kitchen, they’ll cut your throat.”

If you step back for even a moment, this claim seems self-evidently false. The government has a list of precisely 13,099 vicious murderers who it has allowed into the country, indexed and then allowed to walk free? To what end? The crowd at Trump’s rallies, skipping this moment of reflection, reacted with the outrage Trump sought.

The reality is more complicated, as you might have expected. CNN’s Daniel Dale has a thorough explanation of what the numbers are and how they work, but the simplest explanation is that the 13,099 number extends back for decades, not simply since the start of the Biden administration. In fact, it unquestionably includes a number of individuals who arrived during the Trump administration.

Nor are the people on the “non-detained docket,” the focus of the letter to Gonzales, necessarily non-detained. They simply aren’t being detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“ICE’s non-detained docket consists of every potentially removable noncitizen the U.S. government believes is in the United States and who is not currently being held in an ICE detention center — regardless of whether they are detained by someone else,” explained Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, an expert with the American Immigration Council. “That includes people who entered the country decades ago with green cards, people currently serving prison sentences, people with final orders of removal which cannot be carried out for various reasons, people released on an order of supervision or bond while their case proceeds through the immigration court system, people who have won their case and are released while the government appeals, and even people who are fugitives (some of whom may have even returned to their home country).”

It will be tempting for Trump’s allies to move the goal posts and suggest that corrective information is somehow a defense of having convicted murderers on America’s streets — something that, of course, is the case regardless of immigration status. It isn’t. It is, instead, an effort to rebut obviously exaggerated claims like Trump’s, that foreign countries are willfully and repeatedly releasing people convicted of murder into the U.S. under Biden.

It’s telling that Trump claimed to have been talking about this for only three years, given that an insistence that foreign governments were dumping criminals in the United States was a foundational element of his first presidential campaign. Dale’s data indicate that the non-detained docket included hundreds of thousands of people when Trump took office and when he left office, with the size of that group increasing more modestly under Biden.

“[T]he list grew about 10% between August 2016 and June 2021 — a roughly five-year period that included the four-year Trump administration,” Dale wrote, “and then grew about another roughly 5% in the three-plus years under the Biden-Harris administration between June 2021 and July 2024.”

In 2009, Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig wrote an insightful essay for the New Republic warning that unfettered access to government data would allow bad-faith actors to cherry-pick information that fit their narrative goals. That’s what’s happened here: Detailed data presented to a federal legislator was distilled to an out-of-context talking point meant to bolster the idea that the Biden administration was for unexplained reasons putting America at risk. The reality was more complicated and less punchy.

Just as the reality of that dinner invitation to the Clinton campaign staffer was not nefarious, despite what was presented. But which is a more compelling story to a Republican base motivated to believe the worst of the left: that an artist wanted a prominent Democrat at her dinner or that the Democrat was a secret Satanist? And which is a more compelling story to Trump’s base: that Biden, like his predecessor, is managing a complicated immigration system or that Biden — and Harris, of course — want people to have their throats cut at the kitchen table?