Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s first TV ad shows dozens of people attempting to jump a border fence as a narrator talks about illegal immigration from Mexico. But fact-checkers pointed out that the ad actually shows Moroccans.
PolitiFact traced the footage shown right as a narrator says “he’ll stop illegal immigration by building a wall on our southern border that Mexico will pay for” back to a video posted by Italian television network RepubblicaTV.
On May 1, 2014, about 800 Moroccan migrants tried to cross the border into Melilla, a territory of Spain. They rushed the wall that separates Melilla from the rest of the African continent, according to PolitiFact. The video later surfaced on YouTube in a July 2015 post titled, “1,000s of immigrants try to cross the border at once.”
PolitiFact rated the campaign ad as Pants on Fire, meaning “the statement is not accurate and makes a ridiculous claim.”
To which the Trump campaign responded that they knew exactly what they were doing, writing in a statement that the video was selected “to demonstrate the severe impact of an open border and the very real threat Americans face if we do not immediately build a wall and stop illegal immigration.”
Campaign manager Corey Lewandowski added some color, telling NBC News, “No sh– it’s not the Mexican border, but that’s what our country is going to look like. This was 1,000 percent on purpose.”
As with most things Trump, Twitter users had some fun.
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