Fact checks on Trump's State of the Union address, Abrams' rebuttal
President Donald Trump delivered his second State of the Union address. The Democrats' response by Stacey Abrams followed.
The Associated Press fact-checked remarks from both speeches:
BORDER WALL
TRUMP: "These (border) agents will tell you where walls go up, illegal crossings go way, way down ... San Diego used to have the most illegal border crossings in our country. In response, a strong security wall was put in place. This powerful barrier almost completely ended illegal crossings ... Simply put, walls work and walls save lives."
THE FACTS: It's a lot more complicated than that.
Yes, Border Patrol arrests in the San Diego sector plummeted 96 percent from nearly 630,000 in 1986 to barely 26,000 in 2017, a period during which walls were built. But the crackdown pushed illegal crossings to less-patrolled and more remote Arizona deserts, where thousands died in the heat. Arrests in Tucson in 2000 nearly matched San Diego's peak.
Critics say the "water-balloon effect" - build a wall in one spot and migrants will find an opening elsewhere - undermines Trump's argument, though proponents say it only demonstrates that walls should be extended.
The Government Accountability Office reported in 2017 that the U.S. has not developed metrics that demonstrate how barriers have contributed to border security.
ABRAMS: "We know bipartisanship could craft a 21st-century immigration plan, but this administration chooses to cage children and tear families apart."
THE FACTS: The cages that Abrams mentions are actually chain-link fences and the Obama administration used them, too.
Children are held behind them, inside holding Border Patrol facilities, under the Trump administration. As well, Obama's administration detained large numbers of unaccompanied children inside chain link fences in 2014. Images that circulated online of children in cages during the height of Trump's family separations controversy were actually from 2014 when Obama was in office.
Children are placed in such areas by age and sex for safety reasons and are held for up to 72 hours by the Border Patrol.
The Department of Homeland Security inspector general visited five detention facilities for unaccompanied children on the Texas border with Mexico in late June, during the height of the furor over family separations, and found they appeared to comply with detention standards. The government watchdog reported that cleanliness was inconsistent but that the children had access to toilets, food, drinks, clean bedding and hygiene items.
At the height of the family separations, about 2,400 children were separated. Since then, 118 children were separated. Immigration officials are allowed to take a child from a parent in certain cases - serious criminal charges against a parent, concerns over the health and welfare of a child or medical concerns.
That policy has long been in place and is separate from the now-suspended zero-tolerance Trump administration policy that saw children separated from parents only because they had crossed illegally.
TARIFFS
TRUMP: "We recently imposed tariffs on $250 billion of Chinese goods - and now our treasury is receiving billions of dollars."
THE FACTS: This is misleading. Yes, money from tariffs is going into the federal treasury, but it's largely coming from U.S. businesses and consumers. It's not foreign countries that are paying these import taxes by cutting a check to the government.
His reference to money coming into the treasury "now" belies the fact that tariffs go back to the founding of the country. This revenue did not start with his increased tariffs on some goods from China.
Tariffs did produce $41.3 billion in tax revenues in the last budget year, according to the Treasury Department. But that is a small fraction of a federal budget that exceeds $4.1 trillion.
The tariffs paid by U.S. companies also tend to result in higher prices for consumers, which is what happened for washing machines after the Trump administration imposed import taxes.
ECONOMY
TRUMP: "In just over two years since the election, we have launched an unprecedented economic boom - a boom that has rarely been seen before. There's been nothing like it. ... An economic miracle is taking place in the United States."
THE FACTS: The president is vastly exaggerating what has been a mild improvement in growth and hiring. The economy is healthy but not nearly one of the best in U.S. history.
The economy expanded at an annual rate of 3.8 percent last spring and summer, a solid pace. But it was just the fastest in four years. In the late 1990s, growth topped 4 percent for four straight years, a level it has not yet reached under Trump. And growth even reached 7.2 percent in 1984.
Almost all independent economists expect slower growth this year as the effect of the Trump administration's tax cuts fade, trade tensions and slower global growth hold back exports, and higher interest rates make it more expensive to borrow to buy cars and homes.
ABRAMS: "The Republican tax bill rigged the system against working people. Rather than bringing back jobs, plants are closing, layoffs are looming and wages struggle to keep pace with the actual cost of living.
THE FACTS: The economy is doing better in the wake of the Trump administration's tax cuts than Abrams suggests. The number of people seeking unemployment benefits, a proxy for layoffs, briefly fell to a five-decade low last month. And average hourly pay is running ahead of inflation.
WAGES
TRUMP: "Wages are rising at the fastest pace in decades, and growing for blue collar workers, who I promised to fight for, they're growing faster than anyone else thought possible."
THE FACTS: This is an unsupported statement because the data on hourly wages for private workers only go back to 2006, not decades.
But data on wages for production workers date back to 1939 - and Trump's claim appears to be unfounded.
Average hourly earnings for production and nonsupervisory workers are up 3.4 percent over the past year, according to the Labor Department. Those wage gains were higher as recently as early 2009. And they were averaging roughly 4 percent before the start of the Great Recession in late 2007.
There are other ways to track wage gains - and those don't work in Trump's favor, either.
Adjusted for inflation, median weekly wages rose just 0.6 percent in 2018. The gains in weekly wages were 2.1 percent in 2015.
WOMEN IN WORKFORCE
TRUMP, in prepared excerpts: "All Americans can be proud that we have more women in the workforce than ever before."
THE FACTS: Of course, there are more women working than ever before. But that's due to population growth - and not something that Trump can credit to any his policies.
The big question is whether a greater percentage of women is working or searching for a job than at any point in history. And on this count, women have enjoyed better times.
Women's labor force participation rate right now is 57.5 percent, according to the Labor Department. The rate has ticked up recently, but it was higher in 2012 and peaked in 2000 at roughly 60 percent.
MINORITY UNEMPLOYMENT
TRUMP: "African-American, Hispanic-American and Asian-American unemployment have all reached their lowest levels ever recorded."
THE FACTS: What he's not saying is that the unemployment rates for all three groups have gone up since reaching record low levels.
Black unemployment reached a record low, 5.9 percent, in May, but rose to 6.8 percent in January. Latino unemployment fell to 4.4 percent, its lowest ever, last October, and Asian unemployment fell to a record low of 2.2 percent in May. But Latino and Asian unemployment also have increased, in part because of the government shutdown, which elevated unemployment last month.
The black rate is still nearly double the jobless rate for whites, at 3.5 percent.
The most dramatic drop in black unemployment came under President Barack Obama, when it fell from a recession high of 16.8 percent in March 2010 to 7.8 percent in January 2017.
ENERGY
TRUMP, in prepared excerpts: "We have unleashed a revolution in American energy - the United States is now the number one producer of oil and natural gas in the world."
THE FACTS: True, if "we" means Trump and his recent predecessors. It's not all to Trump's credit. The government says the U.S. became the world's top natural gas producer in 2013, under Barack Obama's administration.
The U.S. now leads the world in oil production, too, under Trump. That's largely because of a boom in production from shale oil, which also began under Obama.
HUMAN TRAFFICKING
TRUMP: "Human traffickers and sex traffickers take advantage of the wide open areas between our ports of entry to smuggle thousands of young girls and women into the United States and to sell them into prostitution and modern-day slavery."
THE FACTS: His administration has not supplied evidence that women and girls are smuggled by the "thousands" across remote areas of the border for these purposes. What has been established is nearly 80 percent of international trafficking victims cross through legal ports of entry, a flow that would not be stopped by a border wall.
Trump distorts how often trafficking victims come from the southern border, according the Counter-Trafficking Data Collaborative, a global hub for trafficking statistics with data contributed by organizations from around the world.
The National Human Trafficking Hotline, a venture supported by federal money and operated by the anti-trafficking group Polaris, began tracking individual victim records in 2015. From January through June 31, 2018, it tracked 35,000 potential victims. Of those, there was a near equal distribution between foreigners on one hand and U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents on the other.
Most of the labor trafficking victims were foreign, and most of the sex trafficking victims were U.S. citizens. Of foreign nationals, Mexico had the most frequently trafficked.
TRADE-NAFTA
TRUMP: "Our new U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement - or USMCA - will replace NAFTA and deliver for American workers: bringing back our manufacturing jobs, expanding American agriculture, protecting intellectual property, and ensuring that more cars are proudly stamped with the four beautiful words: MADE IN THE USA."
THE FACTS: It's unlikely to do all those things, since the new agreement largely preserves the structure and substance of NAFTA.
In one new feature, the deal requires that 40 percent of cars' contents eventually be made in countries that pay autoworkers at least $16 an hour - that is, in the United States, or Canada, but not in Mexico. It also requires Mexico to pursue an overhaul of labor law to encourage independent unions that will bargain for higher wages and better working conditions for Mexicans.
Still, just before the agreement was signed, General Motors announced that it would lay off 14,000 workers and close five plants in the United States and Canada.
Philip Levy, senior fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and a trade official in Republican President George W. Bush's White House, says: "President Trump has seriously overhyped this agreement."
MIDDLE EAST WARS
TRUMP: "Our brave troops have now been fighting in the Middle East for almost 19 years."
THE FACTS: Trump exaggerated the length of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The war in Afghanistan began in October 2001, in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. The invasion of Iraq was in March 2003. The U.S. has been at war for a bit more than 17 years.
Also, he refers to fighting in the Middle East. Iraq is in the Middle East, but Afghanistan is in south and Central Asia.
FOOD STAMPS
TRUMP, describing progress over the last two years: "Nearly 5 million Americans have been lifted off food stamps."
THE FACTS: The number of people receiving food stamps actually hasn't declined that much.
Government data show there were 44.2 million people participating in the Supplemental Nutrition and Assistance Program in 2016, before Trump took office. In 2018, there were 40.3 million people participating in SNAP. That's a decline of 3.9 million, not the 5 million that Trump talked about.
The number of people participating in the SNAP program peaked in 2013 and has been going down since that time.
Trump's last budget proposed cutting SNAP by $213 billion over 10 years. The administration also has been pushing to give states more flexibility in implementing the program, including tightening work requirements for recipients.
The Washington Post also conducted a live fact check. On its list:
BORDER WALL
TRUMP: "The border city of El Paso, Texas, used to have extremely high rates of violent crime - one of the highest in the country, and considered one of our nation's most dangerous cities. Now, with a powerful barrier in place, El Paso is one of our safest cities."
THE FACTS: Trump appears to be echoing comments he heard from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Jan. 10, but this claim is wrong.
The El Paso Times, in a fact check, said some form of barrier has existed between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez for decades, though Trump appeared to be referring to fencing that was completed in mid-2009:
"Looking broadly at the last 30 years, the rate of violent crime reached its peak in 1993, when more than 6,500 violent crimes were recorded. Between 1993 and 2006, the number of violent crimes fell by more than 34 percent and less than 2,700 violent crimes were reported. The border fence was authorized by [President George W.] Bush in 2006, but construction did not start until 2008. From 2006 to 2011 - two years before the fence was built to two years after - the violent crime rate in El Paso increased by 17 percent."
The city had the third lowest violent crime rate among 35 U.S. cities with a population over 500,000 in 2005, 2006 and 2007 - before construction of a 57-mile-long fence started in mid-2008.
ABC News with AP's help checked some facts, as reported by ABC 7 Chicago:
PRESCRIPTION DRUG PRICES
TRUMP: "Americans pay vastly more than people in other countries for the exact same drugs, often made in the exact same place."
THE FACTS: This is true. A government study has found that Medicare pays more for some drugs than other wealthy nations.
Last fall, the government released a study that found Medicare - the federally run health care program for seniors - paid more than other industrialized countries for physician-administered drugs. While the precise amount varied by product, the study found that prices charged by those manufacturers are 1.8 times higher in the U.S. than in other countries.
Trump has proposed that Medicare only agree to pay costs based on cheaper prices paid by other nations. It's one of several proposals he's made in recent months in a bid to drive down costs, although that proposal wouldn't take place for another year or so.
The drug industry had criticized the approach, contending that the money paid goes toward ground breaking research that benefits Americans first. According to one industry group, Americans have access to cancer medicines on average two years earlier than in countries like the United Kingdom, Germany and France. Industry executives also say it's not fair to compare what the U.S. pays for drugs compared to people in countries with socialized health care systems.
DRUG PRICE DECLINE
TRUMP: "As a result of my administration's efforts, in 2018 drug prices experienced their single largest decline in 46 years."
THE FACTS: This is mostly spin. While President Trump is correct that drug prices dropped in the last year - and that hasn't happened since 1972 - the drop was less than 1 percent. Drug prices and spending remain at historically high levels - including for drugs like insulin, which more than doubled in price since 2012 - and many of Trump's efforts to bring down those costs haven't been enacted yet.
According to the Consumer Price Index, that dip is .62 percent looking at data collected on December 2017 to data from December 2018. Last fall, an Associated Press analysis examined the list prices for some 26,000 brand-name drugs and found 96 price hikes for every one price cut.
What Trump can point to in favor of consumers is an aggressive push by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration during his administration to approve generic drugs. White House advisers in an October 2018 report estimated that the recent approval of generic drugs has resulted in $26 billion in savings for consumers that would have otherwise had to choose brand name drugs. Among those approved under Trump was the first generic version of EpiPen, the lifesaving auto injector used to treat emergency reactions. EpiPen injectors went from costing $100 in 2009 to $600 in 2016.