On 29 January, the second Trump administration held its first White House press briefing. “Of the 3,500 arrests Ice has made so far since President Trump came back into office, can you just tell us the numbers?” asked a reporter in the front row. “How many have a criminal record versus those who are just in the country illegally?”

“All of them,” responded the new White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, making her debut in the briefing room, “because they illegally broke our nation’s laws, and, therefore, they are criminals, as far as this administration goes.” She continued: “I know the last administration didn’t see it that way, so it’s a big culture shift in our nation to view someone who breaks our immigration laws as a criminal. But that’s exactly what they are.”

Leavitt’s answer delighted Maga media and went viral in conservative circles, with a fire emoji from a Daily Wire reporter, a bullseye emoji from the Heritage Foundation, and a mic drop emoji from the Republican Study Committee.

It was also completely, utterly, totally, wrong. Factually inaccurate. A brazen lie.

In the eyes of this administration, immigrants who are undocumented are all “illegal immigrants” and these “illegal immigrants”, ergo, are all “criminals”.

But, on so many levels, it’s just not true. It’s a popular myth pushed by the right that needs urgent debunking.

First, people are not, are never, illegal. It was the Nobel laureate and former Auschwitz prisoner Elie Wiesel who pointed out how “no human being is ‘illegal’” because it is “a contradiction in terms. People can be beautiful or less beautiful, they can be just or unjust, but illegal? How can a human being be illegal?”

An act can be illegal; people cannot inherently be illegal.

Second, the anti-immigrant right has not only gotten the language wrong but the law wrong,........

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