Fact-checking the 2024 US vice presidential debate
US vice presidential candidates J.D. Vance and Tim Walz met on October 1, 2024 in what was likely their only live and televised face-to-face debate.
In a mostly cordial clash, Vance, a Republican senator for Ohio, and Walz, the Democratic governor of Minnesota, jousted over foreign policy, immigration, health care and other topics.
AFP fact-checked what the running mates for the Republican and Democratic nominees Donald Trump and Kamala Harris said, respectively.
The situation in the Middle East
Hours after Iran's fired about 200 missiles at Israel, the first question of the debate saw both men being asked if they would support a retaliatory strike by Israel. Neither directly answered the question, instead blaming the other's prospective boss for destabilizing the region.
But during the opening exchanges Vance said: "Iran, which launched this attack, has received over $100 billion in unfrozen assets thanks to the Kamala Harris administration."
This claim is false.
As a part of a global agreement sealed in 2015 and implemented the following year to limit Iran's nuclear program, $100 billion from Iranian oil sales previously held under sanctions was released. Harris, then attorney general of California, was not part of the Obama administration (archived here).
Immigration
Responding to a question about Trump's plan to deport people and when answering another question on housing costs, Vance claimed twice that there are "25 million illegal aliens" in the United States, again implicating Harris, the US vice president since 2021.
"We've got 20, 25 million illegal aliens who are here in the country," he said.
He later added: "We do want to blame Kamala Harris for letting in millions of illegal aliens into this country, which does drive up costs, Tim. Twenty-five million illegal aliens competing with Americans for scarce homes is one of the most significant drivers of home prices in the country."
Vance's figure is not supported by available data.
The Department of Homeland Security estimated in an April report that as of January 2022, there were 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the US (archived here).
Several immigration groups have arrived at similar estimates, including the Migration Policy Institute, which put the number at approximately 11.3 million in mid-2022 (archived here).
"None of them is anywhere close to 20 to 25 million unauthorized immigrants," Michelle Mittelstadt, director of communications for the Migration Policy Institute (archived here), told AFP.
Border officials have encountered migrants trying to illegally cross the US border more than 10 million times during President Joe Biden's administration (archived here). Such incidents, however, are not the same as admissions.
Reproductive rights and abortion
Walz, who signed a law in Minnesota to codify the right to an abortion with no exceptions, said Trump will "make it more difficult, if not impossible to get contraception."
This is misleading. The plan would not restrict standard contraceptive methods, such as birth control pills, but it does call for eliminating no-cost coverage of certain emergency contraceptives under The Affordable Care Act.
Referencing Project 2025 -- a nearly 900-page policy document crafted by the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank -- Walz also falsely claimed that a Trump administration would create a "registry of pregnancies."
The blueprint for reshaping the federal government calls for the collection of detailed abortion statistics, but would not task a federal agency with tracking pregnancies (archived here).
Health care
During a question on health insurance, Vance suggested that Trump "salvaged" The Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, claiming it had been "collapsing."
This claim is false.
The Trump administration repeatedly tried to repeal the act and in 2020 asked the US Supreme Court to overturn it in a case pursued by more than a dozen Republican-led states. The top court rejected the action in 2021.
Despite many promises, the Trump administration never produced an alternative plan to Obamacare, nor has the Trump-Vance 2024 ticket to date.
