In February 2020, Donald Trump said“I could be elected twice over the wall.” He has now been elected for a second term.

After a dramatic presidential race in which Vice President Kamala Harris replaced President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee, the Associated Press on Wednesday declared Donald Trump the winner.

Immigration has dominated the 2024 election cycle, highlighting stark differences between candidates’ rhetoric and policy proposals. Just like Trump did thousands of false statements linking unauthorized migrants to crime and other social problemspolls have shown growing support among voters for reducing immigration. Harris struck a more positive tone, but her policy proposals — while more moderate than Trump’s — still leaned to the right of the Democratic Party’s traditional approach to immigration.

Before the election, The Marshall Project analyzed more than 12,000 of Trump’s public statements on immigration available on Factba.sea public database of presidential candidate statements. Trump relied heavily on repetition; Marshall Project reporters identified his most repeated lies about immigrantssome of which he has done 500 times or more.

Research shows that the more times a person hears a statement, the more likely they are to believe itwhether true or not.

One of Trump’s most repeated claims this year has been that there are millions of immigrants crossing the US southern border who have been intentionally released from foreign prisons, jails and asylums, particularly in countries like Venezuela. These claims have been routinely debunked of journalists, researchers and fact-checkers.

Pressed several times, the Trump campaign did not provide corroboration of the statements. Still, Trump repeated the claim at least 560 times.

Trump’s stated plans for immigration policy in his second term are a continuation of his first term.

He promises to finish building a wall along the 1,900-mile US-Mexico border. About 450 miles of border walls were built during his first term, although 81 percent of the construction replaced old structures. Despite the proven fact the ineffectiveness of such a wall and its cost to taxpayersTrump has repeated the need for a wall more than 675 times.

Trump outlined plans to carry out mass deportations to a historical scaleremoving millions of undocumented people. He proposed the use of migrant detention camps, workplace raids and military enforcement, describing the Eisenhower administrationHis “Operation Wetback” as a model for human deportations. Historians describe at length Eisenhower’s deportations as inhumaneand CRITICS from Trump’s proposal warns that such a massive population shift could lead to unpredictable economic effects on the country.

Trump has also said he will restore the policies of his first administrationincluding banning the entry of people from Muslim-majority countries, separating families at the border, forcing immigrants to stay in Mexico while their asylum cases are processed, and halting refugee programs. He claims he would terminates birthright citizenship for people born in the US to undocumented immigrants.

Scholars have long noted the cumulative effect of immigration as a scapegoat, emphasizing how rhetoric shapes public opinion and policy. Experts say Trump’s language on immigration played a key role changing the boundaries of acceptable speechwhich makes harsh policies like family separation or mass deportation seem more acceptable.

Polls indicate that more Americans favor reducing immigration and tightening border restrictions. A July Gallup poll found that 55 percent of respondents wanted less immigration — the highest number polled in nearly two decades.

Additional polls this year have shown public support for tighter border measures, with many Americans viewing immigration as a key national issue. In Arizona, 63 percent of voters polled supported Proposition 314, a ballot measure that makes it a state crime to cross the border with Mexico outside of official points of entry, allowing local authorities to enforce immigration laws more directly.

The spurious link between immigration and crime has led to real policies in the past in both Republican and Democratic administrations. These include Secure Communities, a Department of Homeland Security program that flags immigrants in local police custody for deportationand US Immigration and Customs Enforcement 287(g) schedulewhich delegates some immigration enforcement duties to local law enforcement authorities.

Experts say such policies don’t work and distract from discussions about real causes and solutions.

“None of (these policies) have delivered the increased public safety that was promised,” said Charis Kubrin, a professor of criminology, law and society at the University of Washington. “Why? Because immigrant crime wasn’t a problem to begin with.”

Learn about how the Marshall Project covers the criminal justice and immigration issues of the 2024 election across the US and in the cities of our local news teams.