TO:              DAVID MUIR, LINSEY DAVIS, & OTHER INTERESTED MEDIA

FROM:        Team Trump

DATE:         September 10, 2024

SUBJECT:  Kamala Harris' Lies on Crime and the Border

 

David, Linsey, and others:

 

In recent months Kamala Harris has repeatedly made two especially preposterous claims regarding public safety: first, she states, falsely, that violent crime is down under the Harris-Biden administration, and second, she states that there are fewer illegal entries across our border today than under President Trump. In advance of the upcoming presidential debate, we felt it necessary to make you aware that that the actual facts show conclusively and irrefutably that Kamala Harris has presided over a staggering increase in violent crime and that illegal border crossings remain at historic highs.

 

Harris’ Fake Border Numbers

 

Americans reading recent news reports claiming that “illegal border crossings” are plunging would likely be left the impression that the Harris-Biden administration has solved the immigration crisis they created and that the number of inadmissible aliens entering the country illegally is just as low as it was when President Trump was in office. This impression would be completely false. Kamala Harris has not reduced the number of illegal crossings—rather, she has recategorized mass illegal immigration as “legal” by unlawfully releasing millions of inadmissible aliens into the country through our Ports of Entry, and flying them over our border directly from other countries. She has not secured the border—she has bypassed the border.

 

Thus, instead of seeking out Border Patrol agents along the southern border to lodge their fraudulent asylum claims, hundreds of thousands of inadmissible aliens are now arriving directly at Ports of Entry and being released into the United States. This flood of migrants through the Ports of Entry is not counted in Border Patrol numbers, because the hidden increase in unlawful alien encounters (that did not exist under Trump) is reported by the CBP Office of Field Operations (OFO), not by Border Patrol (BP). This means that while the number of encounters and apprehensions reflected in Border Patrol statistics is down, it is due not to a decline in migrant traffic, but instead due to a redirection of that traffic. 

 

The Harris-Biden administration has achieved this redirection using two new categorical “parole programs.” 

 

The first of these unauthorized “new lawful pathway” parole programs brought in 24,000 Venezuelan aliens beginning in October 2022 following a 293% increase in unique encounters of Venezuelan illegal aliens between FY21 and FY22. This “parole program” was expanded in January 2023 to include aliens from Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua (CHNV Program) for a total of 30,000 aliens admissions from these four countries every month. Since the CHNV program began in 2023, over 520,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans have been paroled into the country by way of this parole program. None of these aliens’ arrivals are tallied as encounters by Border Patrol. Instead, they are being flown over the border directly into the United States. There have been multiple reports in the last year of illegal aliens being paroled in by way of CHNV who are living at airports including Chicago, Boston, San Diego, and El Paso. 

 

The second “parole” program has illegal aliens wait and schedule their illegal entry at a certain time, date, and port using the CBP One app. As the Harris-Biden administration stated in their White House press release announcing the program in January 2023, they were not doing this to stop or deter illegal immigration, but rather to “reduce wait times and crowds at U.S. ports of entry and allow for safe, orderly, and humane processing.” Since the app was put in place, over 765,000 inadmissible aliens have scheduled their illegal immigration appointment. It was subsequently reported that 95.8% of the aliens who scheduled appointments using the app were released into the interior of the U.S. on “parole” and given a “Notice to Appear.” None of these 765,000 illegal aliens have counted toward encounters by Border Patrol at the Southwest Border that are cited to justify Harris’ claims that she has slowed illegal border crossings.

 

Both of these programs have been subject to litigation where the plaintiffs accurately state that the programs are in direct violation of the Immigration and Nationality Act’s parole statute (8 U.S.C. 1182(d)(5)(A)) which requires parole be prescribed “only on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit.” 

 

In response to litigation questioning the legality of a DHS policy memo which directed agents to prioritize paroling aliens into the country and provide them with alternative forms of detention like ankle monitors, U.S. District Court Judge T. Kent Wetherell, II, wrote that Kamala Harris and Joe Biden’s DHS’s policy memo was unlawful because “it does not comply with the case-by-case requirement; and it does not limit parole to urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit.”

 

As former Immigration Judge at the York Immigration Court in York, Pennsylvania, Andrew Arthur points out, the reason Kamala Harris and Joe Biden created these unauthorized “parole programs” and have shifted the location of where they are having illegal aliens enter into the U.S. is “to hide the ongoing border disaster from American voters heading into a hotly contested election year.” 

 

It is important that journalists not participate in this misinformation effort, wittingly or unwittingly, by uncritically echoing Kamala Harris’ false claims that she has drastically reduced illegal crossings. Inadmissible illegal aliens being admitted through ports of entry at the border, or airports, does not suddenly make them legal. 

 

Harris’ Fake Crime Statistics

 

Kamala Harris has also claimed that “violent crime is now near a fifty year low.” According to a White House press release, Kamala’s false claims about a dramatic drop in crime are ostensibly based on data from the FBI’s Quarterly Uniform Crime Report. As numerous experts have testified, however, this data is completely and totally unreliable at the present time. In 2021, the FBI drastically changed how it collects this crime data from local law enforcement agencies across the country. As a result, thousands of local jurisdictions stopped reporting their crime statistics just as law enforcement and criminal justice policies were being radically altered in cities nationwide.

 

The FBI’s website reveals that the Q1 2024 data Kamala Harris is citing comes from just 71% of the nation’s law enforcement agencies. That means crime data from nearly one third of jurisdictions is missing. Among the jurisdictions that did not report are some of the largest and most violent cities in America: Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, New Orleans, and many others. Ten entire states did not report their data. 

 

Although the FBI attempts to “estimate” crime data for non-reporting agencies using a “statistical weight” from reporting agencies similar in size and type, this practice is unscientific and highly dubious at best—and the flaws in what essentially amounts to ‘filler data’ grow as non-reporting increases. It is absolutely impossible that such “estimations” could concoct a useful picture of thousands of diverse non-reporting jurisdictions, all of which have different policing practices, budgets, prosecutors, local leadership, and populations. While this practice of estimating crime numbers for agencies with missing data has been going on since the 1960s, it historically constituted a miniscule 5% of all agencies reflected in the statistics. There is no credible way to “estimate”—or more accurately, forge or fabricate—reliable crime data for a full one third of the United States.

 

Before Kamala Harris turned these useless statistics into her latest talking point, even liberal publications admitted that the missing data rendered the current FBI crime reports worthless. In May 2022, The Atlantic said that FBI crime numbers are “unlikely to provide the clarity into crime trends” due to “a recent, and significant, change to how the FBI collects crime data”. Additionally, liberal Vox admitted that the FBI “had to estimate crime data like never before” and that “it may be several more years before as many agencies are reporting as used to under the old [FBI data collection] system”—meaning there would be “serious limits to what the new data can tell us about what actually happened last year.”

 

As the old computer science saying goes: Garbage In, Garbage Out. The statistics Kamala Harris cites are just that—garbage.

 

The Real Facts Show Kamala Harris Has Presided Over a Colossal Increase in Violent Crime

 

Given the total unreliability of the FBI’s current Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program as described above, the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) is by far the most credible and reliable barometer of crime nationwide. Unlike the FBI numbers, which even in the best of circumstances only account for crimes that are reported to police, the NCVS measures both crimes that get reported and those that go unreported to law enforcement. It is a survey not of police reports, but of crime victims. 

 

According to the NCVS, Kamala Harris has overseen a violent crime wave of historic proportions. The NCVS reveals that between 2020 and 2022 (the most recent year for which data is available), there was a 43% increase in violent crime, 58% increase in rape, 89% increase in aggravated assault, and a 56% increase in robbery.”

 

Additionally, the NCVS finds that more Americans were victims of violent crimes in 2022 than in any year since 2012.

 

Murders and Attacks on Police Soar Under Kamala Harris

 

Kamala Harris has also presided over three of the four most murderous years in the last quarter century. Even using the flawed FBI data which Harris and Biden are citing, there has been a 10% increase in the average annual number of homicides under Kamala Harris and Joe Biden as compared to Trump (Trump 18,627 vs. Harris 20,700). 

 

Likewise, according to data compiled by the National Fraternal Order of Police, the number of police shot in the line of duty this year is 16% higher when compared to the same time during Kamala Harris’ first year in office. Compared to 2020, there has been a 45% increase ambushes on police, a 55% increase in the number of police shot in those ambushes, and an 82% increase in the number of police who have died from ambush shootings this year. Last year marked the highest rate of assaults on police at any point in the last decade, with over 79,000 assaults, a 32% increase from President Trump’s final year in office. 

 

Local Data Underscores Giant Crime Spree

 

Also useful are the data from individual U.S. cities. While anecdotal, major increases in crime in numerous major U.S. cities are obviously inconsistent with Kamala Harris’ false picture of a historic drop in crime. And these are not minor fluctuations—these are humungous swings.

 

Between President Trump’s final year in office and the end of 2023, crime in many American cities rose substantially, often dramatically. Using the latest available data, since 2020, there has been a 166% increase in carjackings in Washington D.C., as well as a 38% increase in homicides, and a 74% increase in robbery. In New York City, there has been a 75% increase in carjackings and a 42% increase in grand larceny. In Atlanta, there has been a 66% increase in carjackings and a 16% increase in aggravated assaults. In Chicago, there has been a 40% increase in robbery, 24% increase in assaults, and a 155% increase in stalking cases. In Philadelphia, there’s been a 135% increase in retail theft and a 152% increase in carjackings. In San Francisco, there’s been a 26% increase in grand larceny and a 10% increase in carjackings. In Seattle, there’s been an 85% increase in carjackings and a 23% increase in aggravated assaults. 

 

The downward spiral has continued: just in the last year, there has been a 21% increase in homicides in Charlotte, 17% increase in homicides in Minneapolis, 56% increase in homicides in Long Beach, 25% increase in homicides in Aurora, 38% increase in homicides in Colorado Springs, 19% increase in homicides in Syracuse, and a 83% increase in homicides in Savannah, Georgia. 

 

Surging Migrant Crime

 

Kamala Harris’ reign as Border Czar has led to a catastrophic wave of migrant crime. In recent months, 75% of the criminals arrested for assault, robbery, and domestic violence in Midtown Manhattan have been illegal aliens, and 60% of those arrested in Queens have also been migrants. 

 

In recent weeks, Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang members have taken over entire apartment complexes in Aurora, Colorado. In June, 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray in Texas was tied up, assaulted, and strangled to death by migrant criminals from Venezuela that Border Czar Harris released into our country. In February, an illegal alien shot three DC police officers through a door. In June, an illegal alien shot two NYPD officers—one in the chest and one in the leg. In July, another illegal alien repeatedly shot a San Antonio police officer with a rifle. Recently, a migrant from Haiti who Kamala flew into the country was arrested in Massachusetts for molesting a 10-year-old boy. Last month, another Haitian migrant was arrested in the same state for raping a 15-year-old girl.

 

It’s Not Crime That’s Down; It’s Crime Reporting That’s Down

 

The NCVS has shown that reporting of crime has been on a steady decline for the last three decades.

 

The NCVS reveals that in 2022, there was a 4% decrease in reporting of violent crimes, and a 12% decrease in reporting of violent crimes committed by strangers compared to 2021.

 

It's no mystery why crime reporting would be down sharply: in the wake of the radical left’s war on law enforcement and police starting in 2020, jurisdictions across the country began adopting the most extreme left-wing criminal justice policies ever implemented (and did so with the support of Kamala Harris and her party). Marxist prosecutors stopped prosecuting numerous offenses, leading police to stop arresting criminals for crimes that would never be prosecuted, leading more victims not to even call the police. 

 

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, there are a few reasons why victims decide not to report crime. First, they “fear of reprisal or getting the offender in trouble.” Second, they believe “the police would not or could not do anything to help.” Third, they believe “the crime to be a personal issue or too trivial to report.” The Democrat Party’s war on police and law enforcement exacerbates each and every one of these factors leading victims not to report crime.

 

Never forget: the Kamala Crime Wave Was Started by Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, and the Democrat Party.

 

As everyone knows, the Democrat Party in 2020 launched a colossal campaign of violence and vilification against police officers and law enforcement across the country. This crusade to “Defund the Police,” or, euphemistically, “Reimagine Public Safety,” included widespread violent rioting that was accepted and often encouraged by Democrat politicians. Kamala Harris, her radical supporters, and her media allies put a target on the backs of law enforcement officers nationwide. Instead of helping law-abiding Americans who were victimized by violent criminals during the 2020 riots, Kamala Harris urged people to donate to a fund that bailed violent rioters, arsonists, and looters out of jail. One of the criminals she helped bail out of jail went on to murder a man in St. Paul, shooting him six times in the head and torso.

 

As a direct result of the Democrat Party’s crusade against law enforcement, there were over 4,000 additional assaults on police in 2020 compared to 2019—and the left-wing war on police has only continued. Police officers were bullied and intimidated into backing off the enforcement of the law. Mass resignations ensued. 

 

Those resignations were predictably followed by recruiting struggles across the country. The Police Executive Research Forum reported a nearly 5% decrease in the number of uniformed police officers on the streets between 2020 and 2024, a reduction of over 7,800 officers. The International Association of Chiefs of Police President John Letteney attributes this recruiting shortfall to “media coverage [that] has led many young people to view police differently than their parents' generation may have.” The Police Executive Research Forum reported a 25% increase in yearly officer resignations from 2020 to 2023 in an analysis conducted in January of this year.

 

In the summer of 2020, Los Angeles had 9,750 police officers in its ranks; now it has 8,908. Seattle has had a net loss of 355 officers since 2020, and in 2023 the police force had the fewest number of people on staff in over three decades. The St. Louis Police Department lost nearly 18% of its police force between 2022 and 2023. Last year Washington D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) had 3,350 sworn officers, 450 fewer than 2020. The MPD Chief of Police reported that his department was “at the lowest staffing level” in “the past 50 years.”

 

Meanwhile, with Kamala Harris’ support, left-wing jurisdictions literally did “defund the police.” New York City cut their police department budget by $317 million, Los Angeles by $150 million, Baltimore by $22 million, San Francisco by $120 million, Minneapolis by $8 million, Oakland by $14 million, Portland by $15 million, Washington D.C. by $15 million, Philadelphia by $33 million, and Salt Lake City by $5 million.

 

Making matters even worse, she and Kamala Harris has repeatedly pushed Congress to pass legislation that would strip police officers of qualified immunity and expose them to an endless barrage of lawsuits to bankrupt them and potentially even subject them to criminal penalties. Kamala Harris was one of the cosponsors of such legislation in 2020.

 

As a direct result of these left-wing assaults on law enforcement, police have arrested an average of 800,000 fewer criminals per year under Kamala Harris than they did under President Trump—leaving Americans much less safe under Kamala Harris.

 

Marxist DAs Refuse to Enforce the Law

 

The Kamala Crime Wave has been compounded by left-wing jurisdictions that gutted prosecution and penalties for dangerous criminals. 

 

In New York, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced that he would cease prosecutions of most trespassing cases, resisting arrest, prostitution, drug dealing (marijuana), and more. Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascon, who Kamala Harris endorsed, directed prosecutors to decline or dismiss charges against individuals for trespassing, disturbing the peace, driving without a valid license, driving on a suspended license, making criminal threats, public intoxication, and loitering to commit prostitution. In Philadelphia, District Attorney Larry Krasner treats theft of any goods valued at less than $500 as a mere “summary offense” unless the perpetrator happens to also have a documented history of theft. Former San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin brought charges for shoplifting of items under $950 less than half the time such arrests occurred between 2020 and 2021. Cook County District Attorney Kim Foxx raised the threshold for theft to be considered a felony from $300 to $1,000. 

 

Within one year of New York State implementing its law to abolish cash bail in 2020, the city of New York saw a 97% increase in shootings, 42% increase in burglaries, 44% increase in murders, and a 67% increase in carjackings. Kamala not only endorsed this policy as a U.S. Senator, she specifically stated that she was one of “leaders” of the moment to “get rid of the cash bail system in America” during an interview in 2019. Kamala continues to support abolishing cash bail to this day. In the White House’s “National Strategy on Gender Equity and Equality,” Harris and Biden restated that their goal is to “end cash bail”.

 

Crime Follows Kamala Wherever She Goes

 

Unfortunately, the disastrous results of Kamala’s crime policies are not a surprise to those Americans who have lived under her policies in the past. During her tenure as California’s Attorney General, California saw a 12% increase in violent crime, 8% increase in homicide, 88% increase in rape, 14% increase in aggravate assaults, and a 20% increase in motor vehicle theft. As DA of San Francisco, she supported the city’s status as a “sanctuary” for criminal illegal aliens which refused to turn over criminals to ICE when they were released from jail. Kamala was so weak on crime that the San Francisco Police Officers Association has refused to endorse her in every single race she has run since she became San Francisco DA.

 

Americans Know Kamala Harris is Lying About Crime

 

Kamala Harris may feel she can lie with impunity about crime using her fake statistics, but the American People are not fooled. The public knows that crime is way up.

 

Earlier this year, 68% of Republicans, 58% of Independents, and even 47% of Democrats said reducing crime “should be a top priority” for the President and Congress. The majority of Americans also reported that since last year, crime had increased at both the local and national levels (55% and 77% respectively).

 

Kamala Harris offers no explanation for how or why 77% of Americans are wrong to trust their own experience over her fake crime statistics. 

 

Rampant Crime Has Degraded the Quality of Daily Life Under Harris

 

It should be no shock that Americans are not fooled by Kamala Harris’ empty talking points on crime. The Kamala Crime Wave has a daily impact on Americans’ quality of life.

 

Conditions have become so lawless in some Democrat-run cities that residents are preemptively leaving their cars open so would-be thieves don’t smash their windows. Business owners are resorting to leaving signs for potential criminals, pleading with them not to rob the customers. Smash-and-grab robberies are spilling into the suburbs. Convenience stores are closing down and department stores are leaving inner cities because the shelves are being looted bare. At CVS, Walgreens, and Duane Reade, even the cheapest and most basic merchandise has to be locked up to prevent the stores from being cleaned out. 

 

This was not the case under President Trump, and Americans know it—regardless of Kamala’s pathetic claims.

 

***

 

The issues of crime and border security are of paramount importance to the American People as they weigh which candidate to vote for in the 2024 election. That is why it is crucial that the media analysts hold Kamala Harris to account for her egregiously false claims on crime and illegal immigration. 

 

Good-faith journalists and commentators should not allow themselves to be bullied or duped by the Harris campaign into parroting Kamala’s preposterous claims that she is leading a renaissance of public safety and border security. Kamala Harris and Joe Biden ran for office riding on the back of an all-out assault on American law enforcement and pledging to halt immigration enforcement on their first day in office. They embraced the most catastrophic criminal justice agenda and extreme open borders policies of any presidential campaign in history, and once in office, they have overseen the most disastrous and sustained degradation of public safety in living memory, while deliberately destroying the sovereign borders of the United States. 

 

President Trump will immediately begin to restore law and order to our country as soon as he takes the oath of office.

 

Read the full memo here.

 

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