President Trump's newest midterm ad didn't just earn bipartisan condemnation for its "bigoted" implications. It's also based on a handful of falsehoods, a new fact check from HuffPost shows.
Trump released an ad on Wednesday featuring Luis Bracamontes, an undocumented man sentenced to death this February for killing two police officers. The ad claims "Democrats let him into our country," which The Daily Beast points out is technically true. Bracamontes entered the U.S. in 1993 when former President Bill Clinton was in office. But it's not entirely true that "Democrats let him stay," as the ad claims, because Bracamontes was also deported under Clinton in 1997.
Bracamontes returned to the U.S. less than a year after his deportation and was quickly arrested on a drug charge. But this time, it was Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio who let Bracamontes stay, releasing him from custody for "unknown reasons," HuffPost reports. That's the same Arpaio who Trump pardoned last August, and who Vice President Mike Pence once called a "tireless champion of strong borders and the rule of law."
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Afterward, Bracamontes stayed in the U.S. until 2001, when he was deported under former President George W. Bush's watch, per The Sacramento Bee. Bracamontes then returned to the U.S. again under Bush's administration, and seemingly didn't leave until he killed two California officers in 2014. Bracamontes used an AR-15 assault rifle to shoot the officers, "which both [Trump] and the Republicans have long resisted banning," The Daily Beast notes. There are a few more disputable claims in Trump's campaign ad, which you can read about at HuffPost.
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