The president has claimed that some 11,000 murderers are walking free in America
Thousands of terrorists and murderers have managed to settle in the US, according to President Donald Trump, who has pledged to reverse many of the policies of his predecessor, Joe Biden.
Trump’s comments came shortly after he signed a series of executive orders to impose an immediate crackdown on immigration. The orders include a reinforcement of the southern border and ending automatic birthright citizenship. The president also designated drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, and reclassified Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels as a terrorist group.
“We have terrorists in our country by the thousands, we have murderers in our country by the tens of thousands … we’re going to take care of it,” Trump claimed on Wednesday in his first interview after returning to the White House as the 47th president.
Some 11,000 people that have committed murders currently live in the US, of whom 48% have killed more than one person, the head of state told Fox News, without providing a source for the statistics.
Trump also accused “other countries” of “emptying jails” right into the US, claiming that the crime rate in Venezuela has dropped by 78%.
“They took their street gangs and they moved them into the US, and you’re seeing that in Colorado and Los Angeles and other places,” the president said.
A survey conducted last year by the Washington-based Pew Research Center indicated that Mexico became the US largest source of immigrants after some 150,000 people legally crossed the border in 2022. It was followed by India (145,000) and China (90,000), Venezuela, Cuba, Brazil and Canada, which each accounted for 50,000 to 60,000 immigrant arrivals.
Mexico, which accounted for 37% of US unauthorized immigrants, remained in the top spot in 2022, with around four million people from the neighboring state living illegally in the US, the latest survey by Pew Research Center suggests. It indicated, however, that the share of Mexican illegal immigrants had dropped to the lowest since the 1990s.
The think tank noted that the total number of illegal immigrants in the US from nations other than Mexico saw a rapid increase from 5.8 million to 6.9 million between 2019 and 2022. El Salvador (750,000), India (725,000), Guatemala (675,000) and Honduras (525,000) were among the countries with the largest unauthorized immigrant populations in the US after Mexico.
