"WashingtonCNN —
On at least three occasions over the last two months, former President Donald Trump has claimed that the leaders of unnamed South American countries are deliberately emptying their “insane asylums” and “mental institutions” to send the patients to the United States as migrants.
In each version of the dramatic story, Trump has claimed he recently read about a doctor at a South American mental institution who said he used to be busy but now has no work to do because all of his patients have been released into the US."
"CNN conducted a broad search for any proof for Trump’s story.
First we reached out to Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung to ask for proof. In response, Cheung sent us links to news articles that were not proof. These articles did not mention anything about South American mental health facilities being emptied under President Joe Biden, nor feature any quote from a doctor at any such facility.
Cheung did cite a
report that late Cuban despot Fidel Castro included mental health patients in the
Mariel boatlift of 1980 (they made up a
small percentage of the people involved in the boatlift), but that was 43 years ago; Trump’s stories have all been present-tense claims about events purportedly happening during Biden’s presidency. And Cheung highlighted a 2022
article from right-wing website Breitbart News about Venezuela supposedly freeing criminals from prison to become migrants. Breitbart’s vague and unverified claim did not mention mental health facilities or doctors at all.
We then reached out to a pro-Trump super PAC asking for evidence for Trump’s “mental institution” story, but a spokesperson didn’t respond. We next turned to two groups that advocate for reduced immigration, the Center for Immigration Studies and the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which would be good candidates to be aware of any such evidence. The center’s Mark Krikorian and the federation’s Ira Mehlman also noted the 1980 boatlift from Cuba, but they said they hadn’t seen anything that would corroborate Trump’s claims about the present.
Three experts from organizations favorable toward immigration – Migration Policy Institute president Andrew Selee, American Immigration Council policy director Aaron Reichlin-Melnick and Washington Office on Latin America director for defense oversight Adam Isacson – also said they had seen nothing to support Trump’s claims. And our own search of online search engines and a database of news articles did not turn up anything.
As a last resort, we
posted Trump’s quotes on Twitter and invited the public to try to find support for them. More than 30 hours later, nobody had."