Thread by @ddale8

Trump thanks ICE agents, whom he calls "special" and also "good-looking." "What you endure is incredible," he says.

Trump says he's going to be talking about people "PERMANENTLY separated from their loved ones" by illegal immigrants who killed their loved ones. He adds: "They're not separated for a day or two days. These are permanently separated."

Trump describes illegal immigrants - perhaps illegal-immigrant criminals, it was vague as usual - as "people that will continuously get into trouble and do bad things."

Trump is reciting statistics on how many crimes "aliens" commit. Rejects stats showing immigrant criminality is very low. "The answer is, it's not true...They're better people than our citizens? It's not true."

Trump says America's current immigration laws are the "weakest in the history of the world," which is ludicrous.

Trump blasts "the mayor of San Diego" for warning illegal immigrants of an ICE operation, says she should be investigated.

He's talking about the mayor of Oakland. The mayor of San Diego is a Republican man.

Trump turns the mic over to Laura Wilkerson, who speaks of how her son was "brutally tortured, strangled over and over, and set on fire after death" by an illegal immigrant. This, she says, is "permanent separation" the media ignores.

Trump is calling up a succession of parents whose children were killed or allegedly killed by unauthorized immigrants. They're telling their stories, criticizing the media for supposedly ignoring them, and calling their situation "permanent separation."

We're several parents into Trump's procession. The father speaking now calls illegal immigrants "invaders." He scoffs a bit confusingly at sympathy for DREAMers, says young Americans are the real "dreamers the United States should focus on."

"You are the biggest birthday present I got, and I'm still waiting for that shovel to help build the wall," the mother speaking now tells Trump.

Trump repeats his regular lie about the diversity visa lottery, falsely claiming other countries "put their absolute worst in a bin and start drawing people."

Individuals enter themselves in the lottery. The State Department conducts the lottery, not foreign countries.

Trump tells the families that their loved ones didn't die in vain, and that event is over.

Trump repeated a parent's claim that 63,000 have been killed by illegal immigrants since 9/11. There's no apparent basis for this. That would be about a quarter of all murders; in Texas, which tracks this, illegal immigrants are charged with roughly 5% of homicides since 2011.

Texas data: 495 homicide charges against illegal immigrants since June 2011. There have been more than 7,500 homicides in Texas in that time. And Texas has the second-largest illegal immigrant population. No good national data, but "63,000" is nonsense. dps.texas.gov/administration…

Here's a more scientific look at illegal immigrant homicide in Texas. In 2015:
Illegal immigrants: 6.4% of population, 5.4% of homicide convictions
Legal immigrants: 10.4% of pop, 1.6% of convictions
Native-born Americans: 83% of pop, 93% of convictions
cato.org/publications/i…

Last math for today: Texas has had about 15% of the U.S. illegal immigrant population. If you assume it thus has 15% of the illegal immigrant homicides, 495 homicides in Texas since mid-2011 extrapolates to 3,300 homicides nationwide, of more than 100,000 total U.S. homicides.

Mystery solved: the original source of the false "63,000 Americans killed by illegal immigrants since 9/11" stat is outlandishly terrible math by...Steve King, @pbump reports. washingtonpost.com/news/politics/…