Trump Claims Migrants Come to US From Prisons and Mental Institutions. Here’s What We Know

During his Jan. 20, 2025, inaugural address, U.S. President Donald Trump repeated a common claim from his election campaign: that “illegal immigrants” were entering the U.S. from “prisons and mental institutions.” Trump said of the outgoing government (at the 3:12 mark):

It fails to protect our magnificent, law-abiding American citizens but provides sanctuary and protection for dangerous criminals, many from prisons and mental institutions, that have illegally entered our country from all over the world.  

Variations of this claim arose throughout Trump’s candidacy for presidency. At his first 2024 election rally in Waco, Texas, on March 25, 2023, Trump presented a version of the claim that included an unverified story about a doctor at a South American mental institution who had allegedly run out of patients because they were being sent to the U.S. Trump said (at the 52:03 mark): 

Other countries are emptying out their prisons and insane asylums and mental institutions and sending their most heinous criminals to the United States. And who can blame them? Who can blame them? These are very smart people, the presidents and the heads of these countries, presidents, prime ministers, and dictators, I know them all. But they’re very smart, very streetwise, and they’re sending their criminals to live in the United States. We’re talking about mental institutions and prisons. Think of it. And they’re all coming in.

I read a story recently, where a doctor in a mental institution, in a certain country in South America is saying, “My whole life, I’ve been so busy taking care of people, but now, I have no people to take care of, because they’re all being sent into the United States.” And I said, “How stupid are we? How stupid are we? How stupid are we?”

Trump repeated the claim at least twice (at the 43:19 mark) in April 2023 (at the 58:06 mark), once in December 2023, and twice in summer 2024, including during a CNN debate with former President Joe Biden, where he repeated the claim four times.

In short, here’s what we know about this claim: Organizations favorable towards immigration and those advocating for lower immigration rates said that they had not seen proof of Trump’s claim in their work. Also, no credible news organizations have reported on documented shipments of people from prisons or mental/psychiatric hospitals in South America to the U.S, at the time of this writing. 

However, data from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection office indicates that arrests of “criminal noncitizens,” meaning people who have been convicted of a crime in the U.S. or abroad, at U.S. borders rose during the Biden presidency. This data does not say whether those arrested came from South America or whether those stopped ultimately entered the U.S. 

Previous fact checks by Factcheck.org, PolitiFact and El Detector also found no evidence that the claim was based in reality. 

We have reached out to the White House for clarification on where Trump’s inauguration address claim originated. We will update this report if we receive a reply. 

CBP Data Shows Rise in Arrests 

According to Customs and Border Protection, arrests of “criminal noncitizens” by the U.S. Border Patrol rose sharply between fiscal year 2020 and fiscal year 2021 — from 2,438 in 2020 to 10,763 in 2021. (A U.S. fiscal year starts on Oct. 1 of the preceding year and ends on Sept. 30.) The presidency during fiscal year 2021 was split between Trump and Biden, with Trump holding office from October 2020 to January 2021, and Biden seeing out the fiscal year through September 2021. In fiscal year 2024, the most recent complete year, 17,048 such arrests were made, showing a rise in arrests since Biden assumed the office.

The CBP defines criminal noncitizens as “individuals who have been convicted of one or more crimes, whether in the United States or abroad, prior to interdiction by the U.S. Border Patrol.” This definition means the individuals included in these statistics could have served prison sentences for their convictions in their home countries. 

However, aside from showing that previously convicted people do attempt to enter the U.S., this CBP data does little to support Trump’s claim. The data does not show the nationalities of the “criminal noncitizens” encountered. It also does not indicate whether those arrested were eventually let into the U.S. or denied admission. The data is also incomplete by nature — people who enter the U.S. illegally generally do so without contact with the CBP. 

Data on whether immigrants have previously been held in mental or psychiatric hospitals was not available in the CBP Public Data Portal. In 2024, Pierluigi Mancini, an expert on immigrant behavioral health, told PolitiFact that “if there are mentally ill persons flooding the United States, they are not coming from psychiatric hospitals.” Mancini reasoned that a journey across the U.S. border is often costly and physically taxing, both of which could be barriers for people with mental illness. Mancini told Snopes on Jan. 21, 2025: “Since I last made those comments there has been no evidence that countries are emptying their prisons and mental health hospitals to send them to the U.S.”

Dr. Luz Maria Garcini, director of the Center for Community and Public Health at Rice University, also made this point. Garcini’s research explores the health needs of historically marginalized communities, including undocumented immigrants. She told Snopes via email: 

The journey to the U.S. is extremely difficult, particularly given the “Remain in Mexico” policy that requires immigrants to reside at the Mexican side of the U.S. Mexico border while awaiting asylum often for long periods of time. These are harsh living conditions that can only be endured by people in optimal physical and mental health.

Immigration Organizations Find No Evidence for Claim

A series of experts from organizations favorable towards immigration and those advocating for lower immigration rates previously said that they had not seen proof of Trump’s claim in their work. We got back in touch with experts who had previously commented on the issue to see if anything had changed.

Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that advocates for lower immigration rates in the U.S., told Snopes on Jan. 20, 2025, that he had no “new information” on Trump’s claims, after telling CNN in 2023 that CIS “hadn’t seen anything that would corroborate Trump’s claims.” 

Similarly Joey Chester, the communications manager for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, an organization working to “reduce the negative impact of uncontrolled immigration,” said via email that it was “not clear if South American countries are purposely ‘sending’ illegal aliens from prisons or mental health institutions across the U.S. border.” In 2023, FAIR’s media director, Ira Mehlman, pointed to the Mariel boatlift as evidence of this happening in the past, a reference that Chester repeated. 

Michelle Mittelstadt, director of communications at the Migration Policy Institute, said the institute’s 2023 comments to CNN — that the institute had seen no proof of Trump’s claim — remained true. Mittelstadt said via email: 

There is no evidence that exists, to our knowledge, that any country is opening its prisons, jails, or mental institutions to let people out so they can migrate to the U.S.

The institute advocates for “sensible, well thought-out immigration and integration policies” in North America and Europe.

We have also reached out to the American Immigration Council and the Washington Office on Latin America to check if they have any new evidence supporting Trump’s claims since 2023.

Old Evidence, Then Silence

Trump’s team last responded to journalist requests for clarification of the president’s claim in 2023. Steven Cheung, then a Trump campaign director and now serving as White House communications director, replied to requests for evidence of the claim with old or irrelevant news articles, according to CNN.

Cheung referenced the Mariel boatlift of 1980 to back up Trump’s claim, CNN said. 

Between April and October 1980, approximately 125,000 Cuban asylum-seekers entered the U.S. after Cuban President Fidel Castro temporarily opened the country’s borders. CNN said Cheung cited a report from 1983 that claimed that the immigrants included people from prisons and mental or psychiatric hospitals. 

However, while Trump may have found inspiration for his claim in the Mariel boatlift, the event happened more than 40 years before Trump’s most recent repetition of the claim in January 2025. Trump consistently lays out the claim as happening in the present, so referencing the Mariel boatlift alone does not constitute evidence. A later, peer-reviewed study on the Mariel boatlift published in Public Health Reports, the official journal of the Office of the U.S. Surgeon General and the U.S. Public Health Service, found that only “a small minority of people” who immigrated as part of the boatlift needed mental health care.

Cheung also referenced a 2022 article from Breitbart about a leaked intelligence report telling Border Patrol agents to look for freed Venezuelan prisoners attempting to cross the U.S. border. Factcheck.org and PolitiFact were not able to access the report in question. A CBP spokesperson told Factcheck.org that the CPB does not “confirm nor speak to potentially improperly disclosed internal documents marked as law enforcement sensitive or for official use only.” We have reached out to the CBP for access to this report, nonetheless.

Fact checks by PolitiFact and Factcheck.org did not receive further comment from Trump’s team about the evidence behind his claim, despite requests. We have also reached out to the White House for clarification and will update this report if we get a response.

Sources