Both sides in the immigration debate are misstating the facts.

President Barack Obama exaggerated when talking about declines in illegal border crossings, and Republican Rick Santorum made a misleading claim about the foreign-born population in the U.S. Obama said that "over the past six years, illegal border crossings have been cut by more than half." Southwest border apprehensions are down 32 percent since fiscal year 2008, based on preliminary figures for fiscal 2014.

The president also claimed that the number of unaccompanied children being apprehended at the border "is now actually lower than it's been in nearly two years." Apprehensions are down from a spike earlier this year, but they still were higher in October 2014 compared with two years ago. Santorum said there were "more people living in this country who were not born here than at any other time in the history of the country." That's true in raw numbers, but a greater percentage of the population was foreign-born from 1860 to 1920.

Giuliani stirs the pot

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani stirred controversy with a number of comments about race, crime and law enforcement, stating: "Black and white people who commit murder are convicted at the same rate."

A 2013 Bureau of Justice Statistics report that looked at felony defendants - people who are charged but not yet convicted - in the 75 largest counties in the U.S. in 2009. That report showed that African-Americans also make up a disproportionate number of murder defendants. Of all people charged with murder, 12 percent were white, 30 percent were Hispanic, and 57 percent were black.

"I do not know why (Giuliani) would limit his comments to murder," said Delores Jones-Brown, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. "When all offenses are taken into consideration, especially drug crimes, the black incarceration rate is substantially higher than that of whites."

"I find it very disappointing that you're not discussing the fact that 93 percent of blacks in America are killed by other blacks," Giuliani said on NBC's "Meet the Press." His point was that the death of a black teenager at the hands of a white cop was "the exception," and if the country is concerned about black homicides, then it would do better to focus on African Americans.

He accurately recites a federal statistic, but he would almost equally be right if he were talking about white homicides at the hands of other whites. According to government data, 84 percent of white homicides were committed by whites. This was true between 1980 and 2008 and in 2012."

Homicides overwhelmingly happen among people who know each other," Professor Kennedy said. "There are relatively few absolutely straight-up stranger homicides."

Holiday fact-checking

"Turkeys today weigh 29.8 pounds," the Mother Jones magazine stated on its Facebook page. "In the '30s, they weighed 13.2 pounds." So, how'd turkeys get so fat: artificial insemination. "The modern bird is too heavy and misshapen to procreate the old-fashioned way," The Atlantic magazine reported the day before Thanksgiving 2013.

Is turkey OK to eat? Yes, according to Harvard Medical School. "A 3-ounce serving of skinless white meat contains 26 grams of protein, barely 2 grams of fat, and under 1 gram of saturated fat," and "it's healthy on the heart."

Enjoy those leftovers!

Chip Tuthill is a longtime resident of Mancos.

Websites used for this column: factcheck.org and politifact.com