WashingtonCNN — On at least three occasions over the last two months, former President Donald Trump has claimed that the leaders of unnamed South American countries are deliberately emptying their “insane asylums” and “mental institutions” to send the patients to the United States as migrants. In each version of the dramatic story, Trump has claimed he recently read about a doctor at a South American mental institution who said he used to be busy but now has no work to do because all of his patients have been released into the US. In a mid-April speech to the National Rifle Association, Trump said: “I read a story not long ago where a man who takes care of a large segment of people in a mental institution in a South American country, a doctor, sounded like a great man actually – he said he no longer has anything to do. He used to work 24-hour days. He said, ‘All of our patients have been released into the United States of America.’” Trump added more color to the story in a Thursday campaign speech in New Hampshire: “There was a story recently about a psychologist. Or psychiatrist. But a psychologist. Who worked in mental wards in South America. And he said, ‘I worked 24…’ – a good man – he worked 24 hours a day taking care of very mentally ill people. And he was sitting there reading a newspaper and they asked him, what – what’s he doing? He said, ‘I have no more work. The people have all been let go into the United States.’ Can you believe? This is what we’re doing.” But Trump has given listeners no reason to believe him on this. HOWEVER, there is a report that late Cuban despot Fidel Castro included mental health patients in the Mariel boatlift of 1980 (they made up a small percentage of the people involved in the boatlift), but that was 43 years ago; Trump’s stories have all been present-tense claims about events purportedly happening during Biden’s presidency.

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