VP Debate 2024: Breaking Down Immigration Claims from Walz and Vance

Last night was likely the final debate of the 2024 presidential election, with Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz facing off against Republican VP pick JD Vance.

Airing at 9 p.m. EST on CBS News, moderators questioned Walz and Vance on the biggest issues facing the United States today, from war in the Middle East to climate change.

Among those topics, immigration loomed large.

What was fact and what was fiction in the claims made about immigration last night? CityBeat has gone through the candidates’ statements and provided a breakdown analysis:

JD Vance: “We have 320,000 children that the Department of Homeland Security has effectively lost. Some of them have been sex trafficked, some of them hopefully are at homes with their families, some of them have been used as drug trafficking mules. The real family separation policy in this country is, unfortunately, Kamala Harris' wide open southern border.”

Fact check: According to a report released from the Department of Homeland Security’s Inspector General’s office this August, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) “could not monitor the location and status of all unaccompanied migrant children (UCs) or initiate removal proceedings as needed.” However, the data in the report does not perfectly match Vance’s allegation. The report states that 32,000 unaccompanied migrant children did not appear for their immigration court dates between 2019-2023, and 291,000 had not been served notices to appear in court by ICE, and had no court dates scheduled as of May 2024. Nowhere in the report does it state that these children are “lost,” literally or in the immigration system.

JD Vance: “The only thing that she (Kamala Harris) did when she became the vice president, when she became the appointed border czar, was to undo 94 Donald Trump executive actions that opened the border.”

Fact check: Kamala Harris never held the role of “border czar,” while serving as Joe Biden’s vice president, and did not oversee immigration policy or enforcement at the U.S/Mexico border. Instead, that job was primarily given to Alejandro Mayorkas, Secretary of Homeland Security, and the Department of Homeland Security. Harris’ relationship with Latin America has been largely as a diplomat, working with Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Mexico to address poverty, corruption and crime in the region. Harris visited the border once: in June 2021 to tour the El Paso, Texas border station.

JD Vance: “Governor Walz brought up the community of Springfield, and he's very worried about the things that I've said in Springfield. Look, in Springfield, Ohio, and in communities all across this country, you've got schools that are overwhelmed, you've got hospitals that are overwhelmed, you have got housing that is totally unaffordable because we brought in millions of illegal immigrants to compete with Americans for scarce homes. The people that I'm most worried about in Springfield, Ohio, are the American citizens who have had their lives destroyed by Kamala Harris' open border.”

Fact check: Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are not in the United States illegally. Many are in the U.S. through the Humanitarian Parole Program, which allows individuals from outside the U.S to enter based on “urgent humanitarian or significant public benefit reasons.” They are then eligible to apply for Temporary Protected Status(TPS), allowing them to live and work in the United States for up to 18 months.

As for housing affordability: A report from Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, released on June 21, 2024, found that immigration is a contributing factor to the U.S.’s housing problems. “In 2022, 35% of immigrants aged 18-64 who arrived within the previous five years headed a household. Understandably, this group had a household formation rate lower than the 41 percent of same-aged immigrants who arrived earlier (between 2012–2016) and the 47 percent of the native-born population in this age group,” the report reads. However, immigration is not the primary reason for housing shortages. Speaking to the New York Times, Daryl Fairweather, chief economist of the online real estate brokerage Redfin, said Vance “ignores the root causes of the housing shortage, which is that we just stopped building homes, especially in places where people want to live the most, and don’t really need to talk about immigration to talk about that problem.” According to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, new home construction dropped significantly after the Great Recession, with fewer new homes built in the 10 years ending in 2018 than in any decade since the 1960s.

JD Vance: “I think it's important to say what's actually going on. So there's an application called the CBP One app where you can go on as an illegal migrant, apply for asylum or apply for parole and be granted legal status at the wave of a Kamala Harris open border wand…That is the facilitation of illegal immigration, Margaret, by our own leadership.”

Fact check: CBP One is an app that was launched on October 20, 2020. In recent years, the app has become “the only way that migrants arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border seeking asylum at a port of entry can preschedule appointments for processing and maintain guaranteed asylum eligibility,” says the American Immigration Council. Despite claims made by Vance of expedient processing for migrants, reports have found the process to be lethargic. According to the American Immigration Lawyers Association, “Migrants have made about 5 million appointment requests per month on the CBP One application between January 2023 and February 2024. However, since January 2023, through the end of March 2024, only about 547,000 individuals have been able to successfully schedule an appointment.”

Tim Walz: "Look, crossings are down compared to when Donald Trump left office."

Fact check: President Biden issued a proclamation on June 4, allowing a partial ban on asylum claims, and grants U.S. authorities more power to reject and deport migrants who enter the country unlawfully. According to U.S Customs and Border Protection, apprehensions along the southern border numbered 58,038 this August, compared to 75,316 when Trump left office in January. Nonetheless, yearly apprehensions at the border have reached record highs, with 2.2 million being apprehended in 2023, compared to the highest amount under the Trump administration, which was 852,000 in 2019.

Tim Walz: “Donald Trump had four years. He had four years to do this. And he promised you, America, how easy it would be. I'll build you a big, beautiful wall and Mexico will pay for it. Less than 2% of that wall got built and Mexico didn't pay a dime.”

Fact check: It is unclear what was meant by Walz when he said Trump built “less than 2% of the wall.” According to an analysis from the Wall Street Journal published on July 19, Trump finished 500 miles of wall across the 2,000-mile southern border. However, “most of that either replaced sections of existing border fencing, or built a second layer of fencing in areas where primary fencing already existed,” according to the Wall Street Journal. According to a Government Accountability Office Report released in June 2021, the Trump administration only built 69 miles of entirely new primary wall systems.