Fact-check: What JD Vance and Tim Walz got right, wrong during the VP debate

Ohio Republican Sen. JD Vance and Minnesota Democratic Gov. Tim Walz met in an Oct. 1 vice presidential debate hosted by CBS News that was cordial and heavy on policy discussion — a striking change from the Sept. 10 debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump that often devolved into personal attacks.

Vance and Walz acknowledged occasional agreement with each other on policy points and respectfully addressed one another throughout the debate. But they also blamed each other’s running mates for problems facing the U.S., including immigration and inflation.

The moderators, "CBS Evening News" anchor Norah O’Donnell and "Face the Nation" host Margaret Brennan, had said they planned to encourage candidates to fact-check each other, but sometimes clarified after candidates’ answers. 

They also pinned down the candidates when they evaded answers, with Brennan pressing Walz to say he misspoke in the past about being in China’s Tiananmen Square during the deadly 1989 protests. Brennan also pushed Vance for specifics on Trump’s mass deportation plan and whether he would separate parents from children, but didn’t get a specific answer.

During the debate, Walz misspoke during a discussion about school shootings. He described changing his position on an assault weapons ban after the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut that killed 26 people, including 20 children.

"I sat in that office with those Sandy Hook parents. I’ve become friends with school shooters," Walz mistakenly said. The gaffe prompted derision on social media, including from Trump, who mocked Walz on Truth Social.

The candidates sparred on numerous topics, including immigration, school shootings, reproductive rights and the economy. We fact-checked several of their statements.

PolitiFact fact-checks statements of people in power, regardless of political party. We’ve rated claims with a variety of Truth-O-Meter ratings from the Republican presidential nominee, former President Donald Trump, and the Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris. This is how we choose claims to check.

Immigration

Vance: "We have 320,000 children that the Department of Homeland Security has effectively lost. Some of them have been sex trafficked."

Mostly False.

This is not what a federal oversight report said. The claim refers to a federal oversight report about unaccompanied minors — children who came to the U.S. without a parent or legal guardian. The report covered fiscal years 2019 through 2023, which includes part of Trump’s presidency.

The report mentioned 32,000 children who failed to appear for their immigration court hearings and 291,000 children whom Immigration and Customs Enforcement had not served a "Notice to Appear." 

A Notice to Appear is a charging document authorities issue and file in immigration court to start removal proceedings. The report said that by not issuing these notices to the children, Immigration and Customs Enforcement limits its chances of verifying their safety after the federal government releases them.

The report led Republican lawmakers and conservative news outlets to say that Immigration and Customs Enforcement "lost" the children or that they are "missing." But the report did not make that claim.

The report said the children are at risk of trafficking, but it didn’t present a number.

Vance: "So there's an application called the CBP One app, where you can go on as an illegal migrant, apply for asylum or apply for parole and be granted legal status."

Mostly False.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection launched the CBP One phone app in 2020, when Trump was president. Biden expanded its use. As of January 2023, people can use the app while in Mexico to make appointments with immigration officials for processing at official ports of entry.

The app is a scheduling tool, not an application for asylum or parole; a lengthy process follows. Vance is wrong to characterize the people making the appointments as "illegal" migrants, because the people using the app haven’t crossed into the U.S. illegally.

At ports of entry, immigration officials can give people humanitarian parole, for up to two years, allowing them to live and work in the U.S. as they apply for asylum. Under U.S. immigration law, people can apply for asylum, but they must be physically in the country. From January 2023 to August 2024, 813,000 people have scheduled appointments on the app, the Department of Homeland Security said.

Humanitarian parole is an official permission to temporarily live in the U.S., but it is not a lawful status. To stay in the U.S. after protections expire, or eventually gain citizenship, people must secure legal status through other avenues, such as asylum, marriage or employment.

Abortion

Walz: "Their Project 2025 is gonna have a registry of pregnancies."

False. 

Project 2025 recommends that states submit more detailed abortion reporting to the federal government. It calls for more information about how and when abortions took place, as well as other statistics for miscarriages and stillbirths.

The manual does not mention, nor call for, a new federal agency tasked with registering pregnant women.

Vance: "As I read the Minnesota law that (Walz) 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."

False.

Experts said cases in which a baby is born following an attempted abortion are rare. Less than 1% of abortions nationwide occur in the third trimester. And infanticide, the crime of killing a child within a year of its birth, is illegal in all U.S. states.

In May 2023, Walz, as Minnesota governor, signed legislation updating a state law for "infants who are born alive." It said babies are "fully recognized" as human people and therefore, protected under state law. The change did not alter regulations that already require doctors to provide patients with appropriate care.

Previously, state law said, "All reasonable measures consistent with good medical practice, including the compilation of appropriate medical records, shall be taken by the responsible medical personnel to preserve the life and health of the born alive infant." The law was updated to instead say medical personnel must "care for the infant who is born alive."

When there are fetal anomalies that make it likely the fetus will die before or soon after birth, some parents decide to terminate the pregnancy by inducing childbirth so that they can hold their dying baby, Democratic Minnesota state Sen. Erin Maye Quade told PolitiFact in September.

This update to the law means infants who are "born alive" receive appropriate medical care dependent on the pregnancy’s circumstances, Maye Quade said.

Iran 

Vance: "Iran, which launched this attack (on Israel), has received over $100 billion and unfrozen assets, thanks to the Kamala Harris administration."

False. 

Under President Barack Obama, Iran did take possession of $100 billion in unfrozen assets after the signing of the Iran nuclear deal, which Trump later overturned. But Harris was not involved in the Obama administration.

Something that occurred on Biden and Harris’ watch was a hostage-release agreement with Iran that was supposed to free $6 billion in frozen Iranian assets. There is no evidence that any of the $6 billion reached Iran.

In August 2023, the U.S. announced an agreement with Iran to secure freedom for five U.S. citizens who’d been detained in the country in exchange for allowing Iran to access $6 billion of its own funds that had been frozen in South Korean banks.

The money consisted of Iranian oil revenue frozen since 2019, when Trump banned Iranian oil exports and sanctioned its banking sector. It was not U.S. taxpayer money. In April 2024, Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo said that those funds had been frozen after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel and had not reached Iran.

Walz: "When Iranian missiles did fall near U.S. troops and they received traumatic brain injuries, Donald Trump wrote it off as ‘headaches.’"

True.

Walz was referring to a Jan. 8, 2020, Iran attack on U.S. soldiers in Iraq. More than 100 soldiers were diagnosed with traumatic brain injuries, according to the Pentagon.

Trump has repeatedly called the injuries "headaches."

In 2020, Trump said he had "heard that they had headaches" and added it "is not very serious." Trump repeated this claim in an Oct. 1 press conference in Wisconsin.

After Iran attacked Israel Oct. 1, Trump responded to a question about whether he should have been stronger on Iran after the 2020 attack that injured U.S. troops. He said: "What does injured mean? You mean because they had a headache because the bombs never hit the fort?"

Walz in China

Walz said he ‘misspoke’ about being in Hong Kong during 1989 Tiananmen Square protests

Walz once described being in Hong Kong during the May 1989 pro-democracy protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square that turned deadly that June. But contemporaneous news reports contradict that timeline. The CBS News debate moderators asked Walz to explain this discrepancy, and Walz said he "misspoke."

In the next sentence, he said: "So, I will just, that’s what I’ve said. So, I was in Hong Kong and China during the democracy protests, went in."

Minnesota Public Radio News and APM Reports found a 1989 Nebraska newspaper report that said Walz planned to leave for China in August of that year, months after the Tiananmen Square protests.

Walz’s first trip to China in 1989 was to teach English and U.S. history for a year at a high school. He and his wife, Gwen, both high school teachers, led school trips to China in the 1990s and early 2000s. Walz said in 2016 that he had visited China about 30 times, but a Harris-Walz campaign spokesperson clarified in September that Walz has been to the country "closer to 15 times," according to Minnesota Public Radio News and APM Reports.

Economy

Vance: "What (Harris has) actually done instead is drive the cost of food higher by 25%, drive the cost of housing higher by about 60%."

Half True.

Grocery prices have risen by 22% since Biden and Harris took office. Housing prices, according to the Case-Shiller home price index, have risen 38%.

Economists have told PolitiFact that the main factors driving the peak inflation in 2022 were postpandemic supply chain backups and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Biden’s pandemic relief bill, the American Rescue Plan Act, exacerbated this inflation, economists say, but it did not cause it.

This also leaves out the simultaneous increase in wages, which have outpaced prices since the start of the pandemic. Wages have also outpaced prices for the past one-year and two-year periods.

Fentanyl and opioids

Vance: "Kamala Harris let in fentanyl into our communities at record levels."

Mostly False.

Illicit fentanyl seizures have been rising for years and reached record highs under Biden’s administration. In fiscal year 2015, for example, U.S. Customs and Border Protection seized 70 pounds of fentanyl. As of August 2024, agents have seized more than 19,000 pounds of fentanyl in fiscal year 2024, which ended in September.

But these are fentanyl seizures — not the amount of the narcotic being "let" into the United States.  

Vance made this claim while criticizing Harris’ immigration policies. But fentanyl enters the U.S. through the southern border mainly at official ports of entry, and it’s mostly smuggled in by U.S. citizens, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission. Most illicit fentanyl in the U.S. comes from Mexico made with chemicals from Chinese labs.

Drug policy experts have said that the illicit fentanyl crisis began years before Biden’s administration and that Biden’s border policies are not to blame for overdose deaths. 

Experts have also said Congress plays a role in reducing illicit fentanyl. Congressional funding for more vehicle scanners would help law enforcement seize more of the fentanyl that comes into the U.S. Harris has called for increased enforcement against illicit fentanyl use.

Walz: "And the good news on this is, is the last 12 months saw the largest decrease in opioid deaths in our nation's history."

Mostly True.

Overdose deaths involving opioids decreased from an estimated 84,181 in 2022 to 81,083 in 2023, based on the most recent provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This decrease, which took place in the second half of 2023, followed a 67% increase in opioid-related deaths between 2017 and 2023.

The U.S. had an estimated 107,543 drug overdose deaths in 2023 — a 3% decrease from the 111,029 deaths estimated in 2022. This is the first annual decrease in overall drug overdose deaths since 2018. Nevertheless, the opioid death toll remains much higher than just a few years ago, according to KFF. It’s too soon to predict whether the downward trend will continue.

Walz’s son as shooting witness

Walz: "Look, I got a, I got a 17-year-old and he witnessed a shooting at a community center playing volleyball."  

The Walz campaign told PolitiFact that Walz’s son, Gus Walz, witnessed a January 2023 shooting outside St. Paul’s Oxford Community Center, which houses the Jimmy Lee Recreation Center. The campaign spokesperson said Gus Walz witnessed the shooting but wasn’t involved in the altercation that preceded it.

Exavir Dwayne Binford Jr., a 26-year-old recreation center employee, got into an argument with a 16-year-old boy that "mushroomed into a fight outside the center that ended with the worker shooting the boy in the head and fleeing," Minnesota’s public radio station MPR News reported.  

In February, Binford was sentenced to 10 years and five months in prison, MPR News reported. 

MPR News reported that children were present during the shooting, and details reported from the criminal complaint support that was the case. 

During a Sept. 12 campaign stop in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Walz mentioned this shooting:  "My own son was in a location where someone was shot in the head," he said. "Too many of us have this." 

Health care

Vance: "Donald Trump could have destroyed the (Affordable Care Act). Instead, he worked in a bipartisan way to ensure that Americans had access to affordable care."

False.

As president, Trump worked to undermine and repeal the Affordable Care Act. He cut millions of dollars in federal funding for ACA outreach and navigators who help people sign up for health coverage. He enabled the sale of short-term health plans that don’t comply with the ACA consumer protections and allowed them to be sold for longer durations, which siphoned people away from the health law’s marketplaces.

Trump's administration also backed state Medicaid waivers that imposed first-ever work requirements, reducing enrollment. He also ended insurance company subsidies that helped offset costs for low-income enrollees, he backed an unsuccessful repeal of the landmark 2010 health law and he backed the demise of a penalty imposed for failing to purchase health insurance.

Affordable Care Act enrollment declined by more than 2 million people during Trump’s presidency, and the number of uninsured Americans rose by 2.3 million, including 726,000 children, from 2016 to 2019, the U.S. Census Bureau reported; that includes three years of Trump’s presidency.

Climate

Walz: "Sen. Vance has said that there's a climate problem in the past. Donald Trump called it (climate change) a hoax and then joked that these things would make more beachfront property to be able to invest in."

True.

In a 2020 speech at Ohio State University, Vance said, "We have a climate problem in our society." But Vance has grown more dubious of climate change in recent years. In 2022, he told the American Leadership Forum, "I’m skeptical of the idea that climate change is caused purely by man. … (The climate has) been changing, as others pointed out, it’s been changing for millennia."

Also that year, Vance said he had "become persuaded that climate change is certainly happening," but that "some of the alarmism is a little overstated."

Trump tweeted that climate change is a "hoax" in 2012, though he made efforts in 2016 to describe that remark as a "joke." But in 2014 and 2015 Trump repeatedly called climate change a "hoax" in speeches, tweets and media appearances. He also made similar "hoax" comments in 2022.

In an August 2024 interview with X owner Elon Musk, Trump said, "The biggest threat is not global warming, where the ocean is going to rise one-eighth of an inch over the next 400 years … and you’ll have more oceanfront property." (The claim about sea level rise is vastly understated and Pants on Fire!)

Energy

Walz: "We are producing more natural gas and more oil at any time than we ever have."

True.

U.S. natural gas production has reached new highs during Joe Biden’s presidency, as has U.S. crude oil production, U.S. Energy Information Administration data shows.

Taxes

Walz: "Donald Trump hasn't paid any federal tax in the last 15 years. The last year as president." 

Mostly False.

Trump paid no federal income tax some years, including his last year as president, but not every year in the last 15 years — and we don’t know what he’s paid since 2020 because his tax returns have not been made public.

In September 2020, The New York Times reported that it obtained copies of Trump’s tax returns. They showed that Trump paid $641,000 in 2015, $750 in federal income taxes in both 2016 and 2017, and, as of that 2020 report, "no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years."

In 2022, the House Ways and Means Committee released Trump’s tax returns from 2015 to 2020. According to those returns, Trump reported paying $999,456 in taxes in 2018, $133,445 in taxes in 2019 and $0 in taxes in 2020, ABC News reported. 

Walz: Trump "gave the tax cuts that predominantly went to the top class. What happened there was an $8 trillion increase in the national debt, the largest ever."

Mostly True.

Saying which income class earned a greater share of the tax cuts varies depending on the year studied. 

A 2017 analysis of the Republican tax law by the nonpartisan Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center said that by 2027, the tax bill would deliver 82.8% of its benefits to the top 1% of  income earners.

The distribution of the benefits before 2027 also skewed toward wealthier Americans, but by a lower percentage. For instance, in 2018, the bill was projected to deliver 20.5% of the benefits to the top 1%, the center’s analysis showed. And as late as 2025, 25.3% of the benefits would flow to the top 1%.

Looking at the increase in federal debt on a president’s watch, Trump currently ranks first for debt accumulated in a single term, at $7.8 trillion. However, Biden is projected to pass Trump’s total by the time he leaves office in January 2025.

Using a different method — counting how much future debt a president’s actions created — Trump’s policies are projected to accumulate roughly double the amount of future debt as Biden’s.

January 6, 2021

Vance: Donald Trump "peacefully gave over power on January the 20th as we have done for 250 years in this country."

Mostly False.

Trump left the White House on Jan. 20, 2021, and another president was sworn in that day. But Vance’s statement ignores Trump’s words and actions that led up to the violent Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. 

In December 2020, Trump repeatedly encouraged his supporters to fight the election results and gather at the Capitol. On Jan. 6, 2021, Trump used his "Save America" rally to repeat inaccurate claims that he won the election. He continually urged the crowd to "fight" before inviting them to march to the Capitol.

"Our country has had enough," Trump said. "We will not take it anymore and that’s what this is all about. To use a favorite term that all of you people really came up with, we will stop the steal." 

The crowd later chanted: "Fight for Trump! Fight for Trump! Fight for Trump!"

At the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, supporters mobbed the building and assaulted law enforcement officers. The riot injured about 150 federal and local police officers and caused more than $1 million in damages to the Capitol. More than 1,500 defendants have been charged.