Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) and Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) sparred over immigration, abortion, and other issues during their vice presidential debate on Tuesday, at times twisting the facts to go after each other.
Focusing largely on policy and less on personal attacks, Vance and Walz made their cases for former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris respectively, with occasional interruptions from the CBS moderators whose performance conservatives largely panned.
Here is a fact-check of some of their most heated moments.
Illegal immigrants in Springfield
Walz and Vance sparred over the migrant situation in Springfield, Ohio, where thousands of Haitian migrants have put a strain on community resources and sparked a national debate.
After Walz first raised the issue of Springfield, Vance described the migrant population there as “illegal immigrants.” Despite their pledge not to fact-check the candidates, a CBS moderator noted that the Haitians in the small Ohio town are not illegal immigrants.
The moderator was technically correct about the legal status of the migrants. However, Vance interjected to argue that the Biden-Harris administration essentially manufactured that legal status in order to let in thousands of Haitian migrants.
The Haitian migrants were admitted into the country under a temporary protected status program meant to shield people seeking to come to the U.S. from home countries facing upheaval or a natural disaster.
Walz countered that the TPS program has been around since 1990.
However, Vance correctly noted that the Biden-Harris administration decided to apply it to the Haitian population in 2021 and then extended it this year.
Without that decision by the Biden-Harris administration, the Haitian migrants would have no legal status. As president, Trump tried to end TPS designations for a number of migrant groups, including Haitians.
The debate over the migrant population in Springfield fell short of the explosive exchange about it that occurred during Trump’s debate with Harris, however. Trump touted unproven reports that Haitian migrants had stolen and eaten neighborhood pets, prompting a rebuke from the debate moderators, a slew of fact-checks, and a viral musical remix of his claim.
Project 2025 ‘registry of pregnancies’
Nowhere in the more than 900-page document outlining what’s known as Project 2025 are there any proposals for restricting contraception or fertility treatments, although Walz is far from the only Democrat to have repeated this false claim.
Trump himself has ruled out supporting birth control restrictions.
“I do not support a ban on birth control, and neither will the Republican Party,” he said in May.
Neither Trump nor Vance have ever proposed restricting access to IVF or other fertility treatments. In fact, Trump has arguably gone further than the Harris-Walz ticket on supporting IVF, proposing a universal coverage mandate for IVF treatments/
Trump has disavowed Project 2025 and had no role in writing it. Some of his former aides were involved in drafting the conservative policy blueprint, which is why Democrats have tried to tie it to the Republican nominee.
Amber Thurman death
Walz was referring to the tragic story of a Georgia woman who died in 2022 after complications from taking the abortion pill; the story was reported last month by ProPublica.
Thurman, according to the left-leaning outlet, traveled to North Carolina in August 2022 to receive the abortion pill after Georgia passed its six-week abortion ban. She was approximately nine weeks pregnant at the time.
When Thurman went to a Georgia hospital days after taking the abortion pill with symptoms of a severe infection, there was no fetal cardiac activity; in other words, she was no longer pregnant, and her treatment would therefore not involve an abortion.
But several hours went by before the hospital prescribed antibiotics for her infection, and nearly a day passed before doctors performed the procedure necessary to clear her uterus of the retained tissue causing her infection. By then, it was too late, and Thurman died.
Critics said Thurman’s story sounded much more like a case of medical malpractice than the results of the Georgia law, which would not have prevented Thurman from receiving treatment for her infection much earlier. Abortion access advocates claimed, without evidence, that doctors may have been worried about how to interpret the Georgia law and may have delayed caring for her while they figured it out.
Anti-abortion access advocates say laws such as Georgia’s never stop a doctor from saving a woman’s life and especially don’t apply when there is no longer a pregnancy involved, as was the case with Thurman.
Still, her case has become a rallying cry for Democrats, including Harris, who warn that abortion restrictions could endanger women by complicating doctors’ ability to make straightforward decisions about their healthcare.
Dying babies in Minnesota
Walz attempted to fact-check Vance over the interpretation of a Minnesota law involving late-term abortions.
“As I read the Minnesota…statute that you signed into law, it says that a doctor who presides over an abortion, where the baby survives, the doctor is under no obligation to provide lifesaving care to a baby who survives a botched late term abortion,” Vance said.
“That is not the way the law is written,” Walz replied.
The debate centers on a change to longstanding state law that Walz, as Minnesota’s governor, signed last year.
The previous statute, on the books for decades, required doctors to “preserve the life and health of the born alive infant” in the rare event of a baby surviving a late-term abortion. The revision Walz approved stripped out some of that language and only required that a doctor “care for the infant who is born alive.”
The change caused anti-abortion access advocates to argue that doctors are no longer legally required to save the life of a baby that survives an abortion in Minnesota. Pro-abortion access advocates point to the federal ban on partial birth abortions to argue that the practice of killing babies delivered alive is already illegal.
During Walz’s time as governor, eight babies were reported to the state as having survived abortions, the Washington Examiner previously reported. None survived, and thanks to a change also enacted under Walz, state law no longer requires abortion clinics to report live births from failed abortions.
Border crossings are down compared to Trump
Vance repeatedly hammered Walz over the spike in illegal immigration that has occurred with Harris in office.
Walz’s claim that border crossings are down under the Biden-Harris administration approaches accuracy (but doesn’t quite get there) when looking strictly at the past few months, but not if one looks at the immigration record of the full Trump term next to the nearly-full Biden-Harris term.
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Border Patrol agents apprehended roughly 58,000 people at the border in August, which represented a significant drop from the record-breaking border crossings seen over the previous few years. In August 2020, the last comparable month from when Trump was in office, Border Patrol recorded 47,283 encounters at the border.
But overall, illegal immigration has been substantially higher under Biden and Harris than under Trump. Although Biden implemented asylum restrictions earlier this year amid election-related scrutiny, millions of illegal immigrants had already entered the country under the more lenient policy of Biden’s first two years in office.