| Todd Blanche’s Brief RNC Speech Was Riddled with Falsehoods |
| The Attorney General ignored the Hatch Act and misled the country about immigration, crime, and drugs |
| Todd Blanche appeared this week at the Republican Party’s midterm convention, and it was par for the course for the Attorney General. He scowled, pointed, and tried to sound tough during his five-minute address. It was both awkward and unprecedented. |
| Blanche also continued his streak of making claims that are misleading if not outright false, which has become a hallmark of his tenure — both because he keeps doing it and because the misrepresentations are so wide-ranging and varied in form. Blanche has, to take just a few examples, falsely claimed that there is “a ton of evidence that the [2020] election was rigged,” attacked judges by mischaracterizing the facts in the cases before them, and, in one particularly strange episode, fabricated a quote that he attributed to former President Barack Obama. |
| On Wednesday night, Blanche was at it again. In some cases, the claims were technically true but misleading by omission, which is just as bad in this context. Government lawyers are supposed to be scrupulous about facts, but the credibility of the Justice Department’s lawyers has sharply declined under the Trump administration — thanks to a seemingly endless run of factual misrepresentations and frivolous legal arguments in high-profile cases — and Blanche continues to lead the way. |
| Most notably, Blanche claimed during his speech that under the Trump administration, “2.6 million criminal aliens who entered the country illegally and should never have been released into our neighborhoods are being swiftly removed.” |
| This is not true, though the underlying source of the falsehood — an empirically baseless extrapolation of data from a report issued last summer by a hard-right anti-immigration think tank — turns out to be just as telling as the falsehood itself. |
| The claim Blanche made appears to have originated with a report last August by the Center for Immigration Studies, which purported to show that “the number of illegal immigrants has fallen by 1.6 million in just the last six months,” based on an analysis of data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. CIS is led by Mark Krikorian, who has a long and well-earned reputation in Washington for being virulently opposed to immigration of pretty much all types. |
| The CIS report was supposed to show that, in addition to the government’s actual removals, the Trump administration had succeeded in getting an even larger number of illegal immigrants to leave voluntarily — otherwise known as “self-deportations” or, in the seemingly anodyne parlance of the CIS report, “out-migration in response to stepped-up enforcement.” If the CIS analysis were correct, it would mean that roughly three times as many illegal immigrants had been leaving the country voluntarily as were actually being removed by the government. |
| The Department of Homeland Security immediately embraced the CIS analysis, even though it was quickly called into question by credible experts. They pointed out, among other things, that the sample size for the underlying BLS survey data was small, that the data was not typically used this way, and that (as CIS acknowledged) immigrants may have become less likely to identify themselves in the survey as foreign-born due to the government’s crackdown. One veteran immigration data analyst described the CIS figure as “a self-serving fantasy.” |
| That did not stop DHS from citing the figure, which, by December, had been revised up to claim that “1.9 million illegal aliens have voluntarily self-deported.” In January, DHS claimed “an estimated 2.2 million self-deportations.” It is unclear from DHS’s releases whether someone at DHS tried to replicate and extend the CIS analysis or — just as likely in this administration — whether they simply inflated the number, more or less randomly, due to the passage of time. |
| Echoing the DHS figures, the White House also claimed in January that the Trump administration had “removed more than 2.6 million illegal aliens,” including “two million self-deportations.” Last week, DHS claimed that “more than 3 million illegal aliens have left the United States.” Even Republican members of Congress who support the administration’s crackdown have questioned the reliability of these figures and asked for further explanation. |
| In other words, Blanche’s “2.6 million criminal aliens” figure appears to have been derived from a highly questionable analysis by a notorious anti-immigration think tank. It is also out of date, even on the government’s own, self-serving account. |
| The thing that makes Blanche’s claim unambiguously false is that, even if you accept the CIS and DHS estimates, there is no basis to claim that these were “criminal aliens who entered the country illegally.” The CIS analysis explicitly included people who were brought to the country as children, people who have (or had) Temporary Protected Status, and people who were admitted by DHS under prior administrations through the government’s parole power. (If you are wondering why the group would describe these people as “illegal immigrants,” it is because CIS is a notorious anti-immigration think tank.) |
| Blanche also claimed during his speech that the government’s crackdown at the border had led to a 21% decline in drug overdose deaths. In this case, the number is accurate, but it is the causal claim that is misleading. |
| Experts have attributed the decline in overdose deaths to other factors, including expanded access to rapid-acting overdose treatments and the end of the pandemic. More to the point, the causal claim makes little sense considering the fact that there was an even larger year-over-year drop — roughly 26%, according to the government — in the year before Trump took office. |
| Blanche also claimed credit on behalf of the administration for “the largest one-year decline in homicides in American history,” but there is little reason to believe that this has much of anything to do with the Justice Department. Homicides are typically prosecuted by state law enforcement authorities, not federal prosecutors, and credible analysts are studying a broad array of factors — none of which involve the DOJ — to explain the drop in violent crime throughout the country. |
| There were other highly misleading claims like this. Blanche claimed credit for “the largest health care fraud takedown in American history,” which took place in June 2025, roughly five months into Trump’s second term. The average health care fraud case takes much longer than five months to investigate and charge — as Blanche almost surely knows — so the 2025 takedown would have been the result of work largely if not entirely done under the last administration. |
| Likewise, Blanche claimed, as he has previously, that Trump and Vice President JD Vance “have always and they will always back the blue.” This is, of course, particularly shameless given Trump’s pardon of hundreds of people who were charged with — and in many cases convicted of — violent offenses committed during the siege of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. |
| All of this happened in a speech that was just five minutes long — the sitting Attorney General spouting government propaganda and obviously false, partisan talking points. |
| These sorts of misrepresentations by Trump administration officials are not new, but it is one thing for DHS political appointees or White House officials to do it, and another thing for the nation’s top law enforcement official to do it. In fact, the speech sounds like it came straight from Stephen Miller, which would make some sense. Last year, Blanche told a friendly crowd, “I love Stephen.” |
| Many Democrats and legal observers have noted that Blanche’s appearance appears to have been a violation of the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal officials like Blanche from engaging in partisan political activity. That said, the Hatch Act is not a particularly formidable tool — the sanctions are civil, not criminal — and nothing would happen until the next administration at the earliest. |
| If anything, Blanche should be more concerned about how his speech may affect the pending bar complaints against him. I would not expect anything to happen to Blanche until after he leaves office — and all the usual caveats for bar investigations apply — but an intentional violation of the Hatch Act is not exactly going to help his case. |
