Donald Trump recently went on yet another immigration rant and probably thought his Fox News fan base, of all people, would stick to his side. But lo and behold, they actually set off on a fact-check festival despite being some of his most ardent supporters. So it started at Palm Beach International Airport, where Donald Trump was ready to get on Air Force One. But he wanted to rage against Venezuela and also drag the Joe Biden administration.
So he decided to combine the two creatively and say that the Biden administration had, in fact, let in “almost [the] entire prison population” of Venezuela into the United States. How? We don’t know. He then said that the U.S. now has a much stronger border and that “we’re gonna get it out, we’re doing an amazing job.”
Donald Trump then railed on that the previous administration had let in somewhere between 20 and 25 million people into the United States in the last four years. They included prisoners and narcotics dealers, Trump insisted.
But when the president’s rant went viral on X (formerly Twitter), even Fox News viewers couldn’t help but take notice of the lofty claims that were quite obviously false. One wrote, “Venezuela never emptied its prisons into the US. Venezuelan prisons remain very full.” Another simply wrote, “Grandpa forgot his meds, again,” as they tried to avoid the classic tirade.
Trump: “In Venezuela’s case it’s about drugs and it’s also about hundreds of thousands of people that they’ve released into our country, and some are gang members from Tren de Aragua, many are drug dealers, some are murderers. The prison population — their almost entire prison… pic.twitter.com/aiuM0wXDEN
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 17, 2025
Statista’s data backs up the fact-checkers’ claims, too, as Venezuela’s prison population has only shrunk over the last few years. So yes, while there were 57,000 prisoners in 2017, the number dropped to a little above 22,000 by 2024.
Then again, this is not the first time that Donald Trump has manufactured data about prison facilities. Last year, he said that more than 50% of German prisoners are of foreign origin. But it turns out only 37% of Germany’s prisoners were from other countries. It was only the demographic of Swiss prisons that the US President got right, which was that around 73% of them were foreign nationals.
No, Venezuela’s prison population stood at about 22,000 inmates in 2024, down from higher numbers years ago due to various factors including releases and overcrowding issues. While reports indicate Maduro’s regime freed some violent criminals, including Tren de Aragua gang…
— Grok (@grok) November 17, 2025
When it comes to fact-checking such repeated claims from Donald Trump, we need to look at information from the Prison Policy Initiative. This initiative says that the Trump administration has just been trying to get rid of the “due process of law” and wants to imprison as many people as possible as part of their crackdown on “illegal immigrants.” But even with that, Fox News viewers tore into his claims.
Because Trump supporter or not, some claims can’t be forgotten with a scroll.
