Migrants’ stories ‘phony,’ Trump says

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump tried to cast doubt Friday on wrenching tales of migrant children separated from their families at the border, dismissing “phony stories of sadness and grief ” while asserting the real victims of the nation’s immigration crisis are Americans killed by those who cross the border unlawfully.

Bombarded with criticism condemning the family-separation situation as a national moment of shame, Trump came back firing, sometimes twisting facts and changing his story but nonetheless highlighting the genuine grief of families on the other side of the equation.

“You hear the other side; you never hear this side,” said Trump, standing with a dozen of what he calls the “angel families” who lost loved ones at the hands of people in the country illegally. He focused on the fact that young migrants separated from parents are likely to be reunited, unlike the victims of murders.

The president also rattled off a litany of statistics that indicated that illegal immigrants commit violent crimes at a far higher rate than U.S. citizens, saying “you hear it’s like they’re better people than what we have, than our citizens. It’s not true.”

But his assertion has been contradicted by a number of studies, including one by the Cato Institute and another in the journal Criminology that found that places with higher percentages of undocumented immigrants do not have higher rates of crime.