Here’s a Closer Look at President Trump’s Big Lie About El Paso

At last night’s State of the Union address, President Trump said this:

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.

This is yet another great example of how to lie by cherry picking statistics. Here is the violent crime rate reported by the El Paso Police Department:

Trump was right! Crime was rising, and when they built the wall it suddenly began to plummet. Build that wall!

But wait. Let’s finish up the chart, shall we? Here is violent crime in El Paso since 1993:

With this broader view it’s easy to see that Trump was lying. As with all big cities, crime in El Paso dropped steadily for more than a decade from its peak in 1993. From 2006-08 it had a brief and minor rise—most likely just noise—and then stayed basically flat after that. Plainly the wall had next to no effect.

However, if you carefully pick your starting date at 2006 and then zoom in, you can make it look like the wall had a massive effect. That’s what Team Trump did. And to drive home what an outright lie this was, here’s a chart of the crime rate in every mid-size city in the United States tracked by the FBI:

El Paso has never had “one of the highest” crime rates in the country. In fact, it’s had the lowest crime rate in the country since 2005, and it’s been among the four lowest since 1991. There’s simply no excuse for pretending that El Paso was ever a high-crime city or that it took the construction of a wall to bring down its crime rate. It’s just flatly not true.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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