Fact check: Walz v Vance vice presidential debate – truths and falsehoods

United States vice presidential candidates JD Vance and Tim Walz met on Tuesday night in their first and potentially only debate ahead of the November election.

Vance, an Ohio senator, is Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s running mate, while Walz, the governor of Minnesota, is Vice President Kamala Harris’s VP pick on the Democratic Party ticket.

The debate, hosted by CBS News, was dominated by heavy policy discussions, and was largely cordial. That was a striking change from the September 10 debate between Harris and former President Trump, a matchup 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.

However, during the debate, they exchanged various accusations. Here, we fact-check the candidates’ claims.

Iran

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

False. 

Under President Barack Obama, Iran did take possession of $100bn 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’s watch was a hostage release agreement with Iran that was supposed to free up $6bn in frozen Iranian assets. There is no evidence that any of the $6bn reached Iran.

In August 2023, the US announced an agreement with Iran to secure the freedom of five US citizens who had been detained in the country in exchange for allowing Iran to access $6bn 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 US taxpayer money. In April 2024, Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo said that those funds had been frozen after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel and had not reached Iran.

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

True.

Walz was referring to a January 8, 2020, Iranian attack on US 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 a news conference on October 1 in Wisconsin.

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

Siamak Namazi, Morad Tahbaz and Emad Shargi, who were released during a prisoner swap deal between the US and Iran, arrive at Doha International Airport [File: Mohammed Dabbous/Reuters]

Project 2025

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.

Immigration

Vance: “We have 320,000 children that the Department of Homeland Security has effectively lost.”

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 US without a parent and guardian. The report mentioned 32,000 children who failed to appear for their immigration court hearings and 291,000 children who 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 they are released by the federal government.

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.

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 in 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.