On Wednesday, November 2, the Young Democrats and Young Republicans clubs participated in a debate on five main topics regarding the upcoming political elections. Five members of each club participated in the debate held in the theatre conference room at lunch that day.

Three of the topics were responded to by both sides, and the following are fact checks on the statements made by both. The fact check was intended to be included in the CoverIt Live stream hosted during the debate, but for the sake of accuracy and time, it is as follows.

The fact checks are only on statements including numbers or statistics and are sourced from unbiased and nonpartisan publications.

Topic 1: Immigration

YOUNG REPUBLICANS: “As stated by the United Nations, nearly 80% of women and girls coming to the US unlawfully have been raped on their journey.”

FACT CHECK:  We found no report or statement from the United Nations stating this statistic. However, in a 2014 investigative report done by Fusion, through interviews with directors of migrant shelters they found that “A staggering 80 percent of Central American girls and women crossing Mexico en route to the United States are raped along the way.”

This report had no statistic that specified the percentage of migrants raped who were migrating “unlawfully”. This is due to the fact many crimes go unreported, since by reporting to the authorities they risk being deported [from Mexico].  A report done by the non profit 2010 Amnesty International found “Women and girl migrants, especially those without legal status traveling in remote areas or on trains, are at heightened risk of sexual violence at the hands of criminal gangs, people traffickers, other migrants or corrupt officials.”

YOUNG REPUBLICANS: “The Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, forces Californian residents alone to pay 1.3 billion dollars in taxes, for the welfare of non citizens, and who aren’t paying taxes.”

FACT CHECK:

The Affordable Care Act covers health care, not welfare. And while the Affordable Care Act itself does not allow immigrants here illegally to purchase coverage, Governor Brown signed SB-10 on June 16, 2016, which allows immigrants here illegally to “buy insurance through Covered California, without cost to the state or federal government, ” as stated by the LA Times. This policy qualifies immigrants here illegally to purchase their own insurance through the already existing California Health Benefit Exchange (the Exchange), which facilitates “the enrollment of qualified individuals and qualified small employers in qualified health plans as required under PPACA,” as stated in the bill’s text.

Politifact rated a statement that undocumented immigrants pay around 12 billion dollars in taxes each year true, after a statement made by María Teresa Kumar in regards to a piece done by The Atlantic.

YOUNG REPUBLICANS: “According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, although illegal immigrants account for only 3.5% of the US population, they account for 9% of murders, 12% of assaults, and 30% of kidnappings.”

FACT CHECK:

According to Pew Research Center, illegal immigrants do constitute approximately 3.5% of the US population. However, the statistics listed are in regard to the murders, assaults, and kidnappings that were brought to the federal court system. Alan Gomez explained these numbers in a USA today article: “Only a tiny percentage of the nation’s violent crimes are handled by the federal court system. Yes, undocumented immigrants accounted for 9.2% of federal murder convictions in 2013, but that represents a grand total of eight murder cases. When you consider that the FBI estimates there were 14,196 murders in the U.S. in 2013, those few cases handled by the federal court system don’t quite register as a reliable sample set.”

“The same goes for the other violent crimes cited in those statistics. Add the fact that undocumented immigrants are far more likely to be caught up in the federal court system because of non-violent immigration violations, and the numbers shouldn’t mean much.”

Topic 2: ISIS

YOUNG REPUBLICANS: “In 2014, ISIS was operating in some 7 nations. Today they are fully operational in 18 countries with aspiring branches in 6 more, for a total of 24.”

FACT CHECK:  This is a direct quote from a speech  on terrorism that Donald Trump gave at Youngstown, Ohio on August 15th.  From the citation giving on Donald Trump’s website, theses numbers are from a map NBC News exclusively obtained from a “classified briefing document received by the White House dated “August 2016” and prepared by the National Counterterrorism Center.”

A CNN study updated on July 25 states that there have been 143 attacks in 29 countries that were either conducted or inspired by ISIS.

YOUNG DEMOCRATS: “Founder of ISIS” -according to Congressional Research Service it’s Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian who formed al Qaeda in Iraq, the group that became ISIS, after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.”

FACT CHECK:

Politifact reported that  “ISIS has used several names since 2004, when long-time Sunni extremist Abu Mus‘ab al-Zarqawi established al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), also known as the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) and more recently the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), according to the National Counterterrorism Center.”  He pledged his group’s allegiance to Osama Bin Laden.

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the current leader of what we now call ISIS, became leader in 2010.

Topic 3: Police Brutality

YOUNG REPUBLICANS: “Some liberals may think stop and frisk is unconstitutional, but Supreme Court Case Terry v. Ohio made it constitutional, and there have been no changes to that ruling.”

FACT CHECK: Correct- In Politifact’s Fact Check, they confirmed that the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 that an officer can legally stop a person if the officer has reasonable suspicion that criminal activity is afoot, and if the officer has a reasonable suspicion that this person is armed, he or she can legally frisk the person for weapons.

In the 2013 case Floyd vs. City of New York, “Judge Shira Scheindlin found that New York City had been conducting unconstitutional stops and frisks on two grounds: Officers were stopping and frisking people without reasonable suspicion, in violation of Terry and the Fourth Amendment; and a disproportionate number of those stopped and frisked were minorities, in violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment,” according to Politifact. So while some practices of the Stop-and-frisk policy in New York were ruled unconstitutional, the Stop-and-frisk policy itself never was.

YOUNG DEMOCRATS: While Trump praised the stop and frisk taking place in New York and how much it helped to reduce crime, about 90% of people stopped were latino and black men who had committed no crime at all according to the New York Civil Liberties Union of New York State.

FACT CHECK:

The New York City’s Bar Association’s report on the NYPD’s Stop-and-Frisk policy, based on NYPD data, stated “Eighty-five percent of those stopped are black and Latino, and are overwhelmingly male. While the NYPD asserts that is understandable because most of the criminal activity is in neighborhoods with predominantly black and Latino populations, the data suggest that even controlling for neighborhood demographics, black and Latino individuals are stopped more often.”

The NYCLU’s Stop-and-Frisk Report, based on NYPD data, confirms that “Nearly nine out of 10 stopped-and-frisked New Yorkers have been completely innocent”.

YOUNG REPUBLICANS: Stop-and- Frisk has reduced crime 85% in New York City.

FACT CHECK: In an Associated Press Fact Check, they found that while murder has plummeted in NYC in the last 20 years, the same is true for other major American cities in the same time frame, and there’s no way to definitively credit stop-and-frisk for this decline. Even as this practice has fallen out of favor under Mayor Bill de Blasio, the murder rate has remained a long ways off of what it was in the 1990s. The New York Times wrote, “Murder is down 32 percent since 2011, the last year of the old stop-and-frisk era, having dropped to 352 homicides in 2015 from 515 in 2011,” based on statistics from NYPD’s Historical New York City’s Crime Data.

YOUNG DEMOCRATS: “However, this does not excuse the fact that in 2016 alone, there have already been a documented 708 deaths by police shootings.  Out of these deaths, 15.6% of the deceased were Hispanic, 24.4%  were African American, and 45.9% were white.  But when you look at the statistics, whites constitute 62% of the U.S. population while African Americans make up merely 13%.”

FACT CHECK:

The fatal force statistics were fact checked from The Washington Post’s Fatal Force Database, and the population data are from the 2015 US Census.

Number of deaths by police shootings: (11/7/16) 820

% deceased Hispanic: 15.5% ( 127/820 )

% deceased African American: 23.8% ( 195/820 )

% deceased white: 45.6% ( 374/820 )

% population white: 77.1%

% population African American: 13.3%

*Race Unknown:  11.6% ( 95/ 820 )

YOUNG DEMOCRATS: “There are roughly 160 million more whites in the U.S. than African Americans (according to the Washington Post) yet out of the 708 deaths so far in 2016, 173 of the deceased have been black. “

FACT CHECK: Updated data from The Washington Posts’s Fatal Force Database shows that out of the 820 deaths by police force, 195 have been black.   

Based on calculations from the 2015 US Census, there were approximately 205,065,207 more whites than blacks in the United States.

Closing Statement:

YOUNG DEMOCRATS: Trump was proposing a 45% tariff on goods coming from China and 35% on goods coming from Mexico. These would raise prices for consumers.

FACT CHECK:

According to Politifact, “During his presidential announcement speech, Trump suggested that if a company like Ford built a factory in Mexico, he would respond by calling Ford’s CEO to say, “Every car and every truck and every part manufactured in this plant that comes across the border, we’re going to charge you a 35-percent tax.’”

Additionally, “In an interview with the New York Times editorial board, Trump said he would support a 45 percent tariff on Chinese exports to the United States.”

Politifact states that the increased costs caused by tariffs would raise consumer costs to “some degree– and probably a large degree.” They quote Lawrence J. White, a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, saying “Retail prices for imported goods into the U.S., and for domestic goods that are reasonable substitutes for imported goods, would increase…This surely does mean a higher cost of living.”