Trump Turns Car Insurance Prices Into Another Anti-Immigrant Lie

Experts say pandemic-era crashes, repair costs, claims, and supply-chain pressures drove the premium spike — not undocumented immigrants.

Donald Trump in the Oval Office.

Donald Trump took a real consumer-cost problem and aimed it at immigrants.

In a Truth Social post, Trump claimed his immigration policies helped bring car insurance premiums down after prices rose under President Joe Biden. He blamed the earlier spike on what he called “Biden Illegals,” claiming that “law-abiding American citizens” had been forced to subsidize immigrants.

Experts said otherwise.

The insurance trend Trump pointed to was real enough: car insurance premiums rose sharply after the early pandemic period and later began to stabilize. But experts tied that shift to COVID-era driving patterns, higher crash claims, riskier and distracted driving, supply-chain disruption, expensive auto parts, repair costs, inflation, and insurer rate adjustments.

They did not tie it to undocumented immigrants.

Michael Clemens, an economics professor at Johns Hopkins University and senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, called Trump’s claim “pure fiction.” He said it did not come from a White House study, the auto insurance industry, or even anti-immigration pressure groups, but from inflammatory statements that placed two unrelated trends next to each other.

Industry experts said rates began stabilizing as insurers recovered from losses and replacement costs moved closer to inflation — not because undocumented immigrants disappeared from the road.

Trump’s claim still did what anti-immigrant politics is designed to do. It took a cost people already feel and gave them an immigrant to blame.

That is the harm. Not just a bad post. Not just another false claim. It is a public attempt to turn undocumented people into the explanation for an economic burden experts say they did not create.

A narrow study has linked undocumented populations to uninsured-driver issues in states where undocumented people are blocked from obtaining driver’s licenses. But that does not explain the roughly 50 percent post-pandemic rise in car insurance premiums. Clemens estimated the Biden-era immigration surge could explain only about 0.07 percent of the increase.

Trump’s story collapses there.

Car insurance prices rose because the pandemic changed driving, crashes, claims, repair costs, supply chains, and insurer pricing. Trump blamed immigrants anyway.

That is how the lie works: take a real bill, attach it to immigrant fear, and use the anger to sell more enforcement.

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Anti-immigrant lies do not stay inside campaign posts.

They become raids, detention, deportation policy, public fear, and blame directed at immigrant communities for problems they did not create.

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