Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Republican Sen. JD Vance of Ohio are facing off Tuesday night in New York City for their first – and only – vice-presidential debate.
CNN’s team is fact-checking the candidates, and this story will be updated throughout the evening.
Vance mischaracterizes Harris’ role on border policy
Sen. JD Vance claimed that Vice-President Kamala Harris was appointed the “border czar” during the Biden administration. “The only thing that she did when she became the vice-president, when she became the appointed border czar, was to undo 94 Donald Trump executive actions that opened the border,” Vance said.
Facts First: Vance’s claim about Harris’ border role is false. Harris was never made Biden’s “border czar,” a label the White House has always emphasized is inaccurate. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is the official in charge of border security. In reality, Biden gave Harris a more limited immigration-related assignment in 2021, asking her to lead diplomacy with El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras in an attempt to address the conditions that prompted their citizens to try to migrate to the United States.
Some Republicans have scoffed at assertions that Harris was never the “border czar,” noting on social media that news articles sometimes described Harris as such. But those articles were wrong. Various news outlets, including CNN, reported as early as the first half of 2021 that the White House emphasized that Harris had not been put in charge of border security as a whole, as “border czar” strongly suggests, and had instead been handed a diplomatic task related to Central American countries.
A White House “fact sheet” in July 2021 said: “On February 2, 2021, President Biden signed an Executive Order that called for the development of a Root Causes Strategy. Since March, Vice-President Kamala Harris has been leading the Administration’s diplomatic efforts to address the root causes of migration from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.”
Biden’s own comments at a March 2021 event announcing the assignment were slightly more muddled, but he said he had asked Harris to lead “our diplomatic effort” to address factors causing migration in the three “Northern Triangle” countries. (Biden also mentioned Mexico that day.) Biden listed factors in these countries he thought had led to migration and said that “if you deal with the problems in-country, it benefits everyone.” And Harris’ comments that day were focused squarely on “root causes.”
Republicans can fairly say that even “root causes” work is a border-related task. But calling her “border czar” goes too far.
From CNN’s Daniel Dale
Walz on jobs from Biden’s climate law
Touting the Biden-Harris administration’s Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, a major climate law for which Vice-President Kamala Harris cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate, her running mate, Tim Walz, spoke of how the law created “200,000 jobs in the country,” including building electric vehicles and solar panels.
Facts First: This claim needs context. While it’s clear that a significant number of new clean energy jobs were created as a result of the Inflation Reduction Act, the “200,000” figure includes jobs that companies have promised to create but aren’t finalized. And other counts of new clean energy jobs have come up with smaller figures.
There are several data sets that track climate law investments, all of which differ slightly. Walz’s number of jobs created by President Joe Biden’s climate law is slightly smaller than a June tally by communications group Climate Power that found a total of 312,900 jobs publicly announced by companies following the IRA passage through May 2024.
E2, another clean energy group that tracks Inflation Reduction Act-related investments and jobs, has counted over 109,000 new clean energy jobs created or announced from August 2022 to May 2024 – significantly lower than the Climate Power number. A recent report from the US Department of Energy found 142,000 new clean energy jobs were created in 2023.
Not all of these jobs have already been created. Climate Power’s topline number also didn’t distinguish between construction jobs building new factories and the long-term jobs at those factories – jobs building batteries, solar panels and electric vehicles, among other things.
Different entities use different methodologies when analyzing data, so it is difficult to determine an exact figure. Regardless, there’s no question there’s a huge amount of clean energy investment, and a significant number of new jobs building EVs and renewables like wind and solar are being created by the Inflation Reduction Act tax credits. The 2024 Energy Department report showed clean energy jobs made up more than half of the total for new energy sector jobs and grew at a rate twice as large as the overall US economy.
The report also acknowledged how the sudden growth in the clean energy sector from the Inflation Reduction Act has made it difficult to track all the jobs that are being created.
From CNN’s Ella Nilsen
Vance on migrants in Springfield, Ohio
Sen. JD Vance said that schools and hospitals in Springfield, Ohio, are “overwhelmed” because of “illegal immigrants.”
“Look, in Springfield, Ohio, and in communities all across this country, you’ve got schools that are overwhelmed, you’ve got hospitals that are overwhelmed … because we brought in millions of illegal immigrants to compete with Americans for scarce homes,” Vance said.
Facts First: Vance’s statement, referencing the Ohio town subject to a firestorm of misinformation about Haitian migrants this summer, is misleading.
We don’t know the immigration status of each and every immigrant in Springfield, but hundreds of thousands of Haitians have official permission to live and work legally in the US. The Springfield city website says, “YES, Haitian immigrants are here legally, under the Immigration Parole Program. Once here, immigrants are then eligible to apply for Temporary Protected Status (TPS).” Republican Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine wrote in a New York Times op-ed about Springfield in September that the Haitian immigrants “are there legally” and that, as a Trump-Vance supporter, he is “saddened” by the candidates’ disparagement of “the legal migrants living in Springfield.”
Many Haitians came into the country under a Biden-Harris administration parole program that gives permission to enter the US to vetted participants with US sponsors. And many have “temporary protected status,” which shields Haitians in the US from deportation and allows them to live and work here for a limited period of time. Some received that protection after the Biden-Harris administration expanded the number of Haitians eligible in June. Others have been living in the US with temporary protected status since before the Biden-Harris administration.
From CNN’s Daniel Dale and Danya Gainor
Vance’s claims about Biden-Harris immigration executive orders
Sen. JD Vance said that the United States has a “historic immigration crisis” because Vice-President Kamala Harris “wanted to undo all of Donald Trump’s border policies” with “94 executive orders” that did things like “suspending deportations” and “decriminalizing illegal aliens.”
Facts First: While the Biden-Harris administration has signed dozens of executive orders about immigration, Vance’s comments about the administration decriminalizing illegal immigration through executive order aren’t true. Harris did, however, say she supported decriminalizing illegal immigration – a position she’s since reversed.
When she was a candidate for president and a sitting US senator, Harris filled out an American Civil Liberties Union questionnaire in which she expressed support for sweeping reductions to Immigration and Custom Enforcement operations, including drastic cuts in ICE funding and an open-ended pledge to “end” immigration detention.
Harris has since acknowledged that some of her stances have evolved over time but that she holds core beliefs that remain unshakable: “My values have not changed,” she said in an August interview with CNN’s Dana Bash.
From CNN’s Hannah Rabinowitz
Walz falsely claims Project 2025 calls for a pregnancy registry
Gov. Tim Walz claimed that Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation think tank’s detailed right-wing blueprint for the next Republican administration, says people will have to register their pregnancies.
“Their Project 2025 is going to have a registry of pregnancies,” Walz said.
Facts First: Walz’s claim is false. Project 2025 does not propose to make people register with any federal agency when they get pregnant. And there is no indication that a Trump-Vance administration is trying to create a new government entity to monitor pregnancies.
Project 2025 is firmly anti-abortion; it proposes, among other things, to criminalize the mailing of abortion medication and devices. But it does not propose to require people to register their pregnancies.
The Project 2025 policy document, released in 2023, proposes that the federal government take steps to make sure it is receiving detailed after-the-fact, anonymous data from every state on abortions and miscarriages. The vast majority of states already submit anonymous abortion data to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on a voluntary basis – the CDC has collected “abortion surveillance” data for decades – and all states already submit some anonymous miscarriage data under federal law.
Minnesota, the state run by Walz, is one of the states that voluntarily submits abortion data to the CDC. And Minnesota posts anonymous abortion and miscarriage data on the state health department’s website every year.
The Project 2025 policy document says the existing federal Department of Health and Human Services should “use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method.”
The document also says the department “should also ensure that statistics are separated by category: spontaneous miscarriage; treatments that incidentally result in the death of a child (such as chemotherapy); stillbirths; and induced abortion.” And it says, “In addition, CDC should require monitoring and reporting for complications due to abortion and every instance of children being born alive after an abortion.”
In the context of the CDC, the word “monitoring” is used to mean statistical tracking. For example, the existing CDC webpage that displays anonymous state-by-state abortion data says, “Since 1987, CDC has monitored abortion-related deaths” through its Pregnancy Mortality Surveillance System. Neither “monitored” nor “surveillance” means the CDC is spying on individuals during their pregnancies.
Trump dodged the question when asked in a Time magazine interview earlier this year whether states should monitor women’s pregnancies to ensure compliance with an abortion ban, saying, “I think they might do that” but that “you’ll have to speak to the individual states.” Walz is free to criticize Trump for this answer, but nowhere in the interview did Trump make an actual proposal to create a new pregnancy-monitoring government body.
Heritage Foundation Vice-President Roger Severino wrote on social media last month that Project 2025 “merely recommends CDC restore the decades-long practice of compiling *anonymous* abortion statistics for all states” – and noted that Minnesota already compiles such data.
Vance denied that a Trump-Vance administration would create a federal pregnancy monitoring agency when asked by CBS moderator Norah O’Donnell.
“Certainly, we won’t,” Vance said.
From CNN’s Daniel Dale and Katie Lobosco
