Ours is a time of provably wrong claims, vociferously stated.

Gas prices are headed to $2 a gallon, President Donald Trump claimed. (Not true — gas prices just dipped below an average of $3 a gallon this week.) The drugs carried by a single smuggler’s boat off the coast of Venezuela are potent enough to kill 25,000 Americans. (Another Trump claim that’s not remotely accurate; the annual estimated death toll from all overdoses last year totaled 80,391.) U.S. citizens caught up in immigration raids face only brief inconvenience and are “promptly” let go as soon as it is determined that a person is “lawfully” in the country.

That last assertion, by Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, in an opinion permitting racial profiling by immigration agents in Los Angeles-area sweeps, caught our eye.

It was an easily tested question: Either U.S. citizens have been detained and arrested or they haven’t. As it happens, we had a reporter who was tracking exactly that. Nicole Foy had been combing social media posts, press reports and court records and had already found multiple instances of citizens who were arrested or detained. It was enough for a story to refute Kavanaugh’s misstatement.

We decided to try to do something more than a “fact check,” a now familiar form of journalism...

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