The group of far-right MAGA mouthpieces took their grievances to Bobby-Q BBQ on 27th Avenue near Interstate 17 on June 15. The gripefest was where political beef met, well, actual beef in a saucy display of steak, booze and fake news.
The Washington, D.C.-based America First Policy Institute, which claims to be nonpartisan, organized the panel keynoted by Chad Wolf. He served as acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security during the Trump administration until he was ousted after a federal judge ruled the appointment was unlawful.
Failed Arizona House candidate Mary Ann Mendoza joined Wolf. Photos of the Mesa Republican wearing blackface at least twice surfaced during her state legislative campaign in 2022. In 2020, the Republican National Convention cancelled her for promoting a QAnon conspiracy theory that Jewish people are plotting to enslave the world.
Steve Ronnebeck, whose son was killed in 2015 while working as a clerk at a QuikTrip also was on the panel. Ronneback became part of Trump's "angel families," a term the ex-president used to describe family members of people killed by undocumented immigrants in the U.S. Other panelists included Art Del Cueto, a National Border Patrol Council leader who espouses anti-immigration positions despite being the son of immigrants from Mexico, and Rob Law, a former Trump administration official who seems to be his own biggest fan.
Before a crowd of several dozen local residents — a mostly white and elderly crowd clad in red MAGA caps — the panel discussed border security and played fast and loose with the truth. We fact-checked four of the claims made during the discussion.
Claim: Tucson crime 10 times worse than Chicago
During the conversation, Ronnebeck told the audience that under President Joe Biden’s administration, crime rates in the city of Tucson are spiking.“Since the administration changed, crime in Tucson is up 180%,” he said. “That’s like taking Chicago and multiplying it by 10. You don’t have safety anymore.”
Biden took office in 2021, and reports of violent crime — murder, aggravated assault and robbery — ticked up slightly from 2020, according to the Arizona Department of Public Safety. In 2020, 3,823 violent incidents were reported compared with 4,012 one year later. By 2022, though, the number had dropped to 918. While Tucson’s overall crime rate still exceeds the national average at 47 per 1,000 residents, it’s a fraction of Chicago’s crime rate, which this year experiences about 76 crimes per 1,000 residents.
Verdict: False. Tucson’s crime rate is significantly lower than Chicago’s. Additionally, Biden doesn't oversee local crime fighting in Tucson.
Claim: Undocumented migrants kill dozens of Americans daily
Mendoza, who declined an interview after learning the reporter was from Phoenix New Times, claimed at the event that “under the Biden administration, at least 25 Americans are killed a day by illegal immigrants in our country.”She offered this as evidence to support her claim: “I stand by that figure because [after a murder] I look at booking information online, and it’s clearly a Hispanic or a Black person," Mendoza said.
Mendoza is also an "angel mom" whose son was killed in 2014 by a drunken wrong-way driver who was in the U.S. illegally. Her June 15 claim comes from propaganda that went viral on social media in 2018 alleging that 10,150 Americans were killed by undocumented immigrants in 2018 — equal to just more than 25 per day.
According to FBI records, there were 16,214 murders in the U.S. that year. That would require 62% of the murders to have been committed by undocumented immigrants, who make up barely 3% of the population. For those reasons, news outlets including Reuters and The Washington Post have already debunked this myth. Changes in undocumented populations have little impact on crime in various metro areas, according to The Marshall Project.
Verdict: False. Mendoza’s claim that most of the nation’s murders are committed by people in the country illegally doesn’t hold water.
Claim: ‘Vast majority’ of Earth’s ‘4 billion people’ want to come to U.S.
In an interview with New Times after the town hall conversation. Wolf explained why he believes Democrats want to encourage illegal immigration, human smuggling, drug trafficking and other crimes related to the southern border.Wolf reasoned that Democrats don’t recognize international borders and feel a humanitarian obligation to welcome all migrants at the expense of crime and overpopulation. A day after he talked to us at Bobby-Q, he said the same thing while testifying before the House Committee on Homeland Security.
During his interview with New Times, the former Trump administration official said, “There are 4 or 5 billion people in the world. I’m sure the vast majority want to come to the United States.”
The global population hasn’t been 4 billion since 1974, two years before Wolf was born. In fact, the global population reached double that — 8 billion — in November 2022.
According to polls conducted by Gallup, the countries whose residents most want to move to the U.S. are China and India — not Mexico. And in those countries, the share of residents who want to expatriate to the U.S. is less than 2%.
Verdict: False. Of the world’s 8 billion people, only 15% want to leave their country at all, let alone in favor of the U.S. Wolf’s claim that more than 50% of the world wants to move stateside is a gross exaggeration.
Claim: Most undocumented migrants not here to work
Wolf argued that most undocumented immigrants don’t make the dangerous trek from Mexico to the U.S. in search of legitimate asylum. Otherwise, he said, they wouldn’t try to sneak in unlawfully.“These are individuals that are able to pay the Mexican cartel to smuggle them across the border,” Wolf posited. “It’s not because they just want a job. They’re coming across this border to do not-so-great things.”
The Migration Policy Institute reports that 11 million undocumented immigrants live in the U.S., and of those, about 70% are gainfully employed. Despite making up about 3% of the total population, undocumented immigrants comprise 4.4% of the workforce.
According to Del Cueto and the National Border Patrol Council, 1.5 million “got aways” have escaped Border Patrol and settled in the U.S. so far during the Biden administration.
“It is a huge number,” Wolf said. “Public safety threats and national security threats are embedded in that number.”
Wolf and his fellow panelists on June 15 blamed Biden for allowing people to pour over the southern border illegally. Wolf told New Times that Biden “doesn’t like immigration enforcement” and that he “doesn’t like seeing people deported.”
But during Biden’s first fiscal year in office, which started Oct. 1, 2021, and ended Sept. 30, 2022, Border Patrol arrested nearly 2.4 million migrants at the southern border — the highest number ever recorded.
Verdict: False. Data shows that the majority of people who migrate to the U.S. illegally do so in search of gainful employment, not to perpetrate crime. Homeland security officials told The Washington Post that the majority of undocumented immigrants — 2 in 3 — are not smuggled in by cartels or other networks.
The outlet also determined that a Republican trope claiming that cartels make $500 million a year smuggling people into the U.S. — an allegation echoed in Phoenix at the June 15 event — was mostly false.
