What Trump lied about this week

The president said “zero illegal aliens have been admitted to the United States.” This is false. Government data shows illegal crossings are down a lot along the U.S.-Mexico border, but it’s not zero. It’s also worth unpacking Trump’s framing of migration to the U.S. as a bad thing. Even if we put aside the humanitarian need to welcome immigrants, which we absolutely shouldn’t overlook, immigration is good for the economy. And though illegal border crossings can be dangerous for migrants, that danger is only exacerbated by the harsh, violent border enforcement that the Trump administration has championed. Another way to address this is by expanding legal immigration — a policy goal the Trump administration has actively worked against.

Trump repeated the lie that immigrants are coming by the millions from prisons and mental institutions. Without even getting into the stigmatization of formerly incarcerated people and mental illness, this is a problematic and unverified claim that Trump has repeated hundreds of times. Criminology and immigration experts have said there hasn’t been a large emptying of prisons and mental institutions. He also lied about the Biden administration admitting “11,888 murderers.” That number likely refers to noncitizens convicted of murder who aren't being detained by ICE, and who entered the U.S. before the Biden administration. Additionally, 11,888 is less than 0.0002% of the total U.S. immigrant population, so that undercuts Trump’s attempted (and false) demonization of immigrants here.

He said his administration is “deporting illegal alien criminals from our country at record numbers,” but over three-fourths of U.S. immigrants who were newly targeted for deportation last year had no criminal convictions against them. And speaking of crime, Trump claimed that “murders in D.C. this January were down close to 100 percent from a year ago.” It’s actually 80 percent, but a decrease nonetheless — though criminologist Jeff Asher told USA Today that it’s “really hard to parse out any effect of the federal deployment in DC, necessarily, because it is a city that was already seeing really strong declines.”

Trump understated his role in gutting welfare programs. He claims to have “lifted 2.4 million Americans, a record, off of food stamps.” “Lifted” is an interesting word to describe cutting funding for and imposing restrictive requirements on a food assistance program that millions of Americans rely on to survive. He boasted about protecting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, even though his signature legislation cut almost $1 trillion from Medicaid funding. There’s no data backing up Trump’s claim that “Americans will now pay the lowest price anywhere in the world for drugs.”

Speed round: Inflation actually is at nearly a five year low but food prices are higher than what Trump claimed, and foreign investments are lower. U.S. businesses pay import taxes because of tariffs — not foreign countries like Trump said. He exaggerated the number of new construction jobs. He said that “no state should be allowed to rip children from their parents’ arms and transition them.” No one is doing this. Some places are, however, protecting trans students' privacy to socially transition without being outed to potentially transphobic parents, despite the administration’s efforts to undercut that. He has not ended eight wars, and after the ceasefire in Gaza that Trump took credit for, Israeli strikes have continued killing Palestinians in an ongoing genocide.

ICE has eliminated exams that were supposed to teach agents how not to brutalize people, on topics like “Encounters to Detention” and “Judgement Pistol Shooting.” A whistleblower told Congress that ICE had also removed 16 hours of firearms training. That same whistleblower said in a memo that the agency was advising officers to enter homes without judicial warrants — an unconstitutional practice at the center of a current fight over government funding and also a centuries-old fight that literally led to the revolution that founded our country.

ICE training on protesters’ rights has also been shortened from two hours to about 10 minutes. Some of these agents have brutalized and killed protestors. And overall training has been shortened from about five months to reportedly a month and a half. And The Intercept reported that ICE has eliminated its Spanish-language training program, despite statistics showing that most of the people ICE arrests are from primarily Spanish-speaking countries.

So, will more ICE training save us? One report found that even when agents were trained on needing to get a warrant before searches and arrests, they still busted into people’s homes without warrants. Critics have noted that the agents who killed Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti received their training before these more recent changes, illustrating broader systemic issues that training reforms would not address. A recent YouGov poll found that more Americans support rather than oppose abolishing ICE; 76% of respondents who are Democrats supported abolishing ICE, even though many Democratic lawmakers appear willing to fund the agency with reforms.

The Supreme Court struck them down last week. The ruling held that Trump exceeded his authority under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act. The law says that during a national emergency, a president can regulate importing or exporting “property in which any foreign country or a national thereof has any interest.”

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that the law doesn’t mention tariffs, so Trump can’t use it to impose tariffs. Two of the justices who voted to strike down the tariffs were Trump appointees. That's notable considering how the court's conservative majority has failed to act as a check on Trump’s authority in a host of other cases. So, what happens now to the $134 billion that the federal government collected from the tariffs? Lower courts will likely decide whether the government needs to return that money to the importers it was collected from.

Trump is no stranger to ignoring court rulings he doesn’t like, but there's an actual legal strategy behind his opposition this time. It hinges on Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, which lets the president impose tariffs. But there are some key limitations here: it’s never been invoked, the tariffs can only be temporary, and it was designed for short-term emergencies rather than long-term policy. He’s using it to reimpose tariffs anyway, causing Europe to press pause on a trade deal with the U.S.

Research shows the tariffs have cost families around $1,700 each. And recent polling shows that nearly two-thirds of Americans disapprove of the tariffs, with 6 in 10 disapproving of Trump.

A credit score is a number that lenders use to determine whether they trust you to pay them back when you borrow money for things like mortgages, auto loans and personal loans. The people deciding whether you’re trustworthy used to work at local credit bureaus that used subjective methods.

Today, the most widely-used credit scores are FICO Vantage Scores. They track your payment history, debt, credit history, new credit and credit mix (i.e. your different kinds of credit types, like credit cards and student loans). You can keep your credit score in the “excellent" range by having multiple accounts that you pay off consistently and completely over a long time. And you can get to “good" by keeping your credit below 30 percent of your limit; like, if you can only put $1,000 on your credit card, keep the amount you need to pay below $300.

Also, your credit score is political! The modernization of credit reporting in the 19th century was largely undertaken by white men with wildly racist, sexist and antisemitic views on who they could trust and who they couldn't. And there are still huge racial disparities in who gets denied for loans.