“But it was built at tremendous cost of American blood and treasure. 38,000 workers died building the Panama Canal.”

Address to a joint session of Congress (in remarks on regaining the Canal)

The documented number of American deaths is roughly 350, about one one-hundredth of Trump's figure. Historical records compiled by the Linda Hall Library show approximately 5,600 workers of all nationalities died during the U.S. construction period, of whom about 350 were white Americans; roughly 4,500 of the dead were non-white laborers, mostly West Indians recruited from Barbados and other Caribbean islands. CBS News' fact-checking team rated the claim false the night Trump made it to Congress on March 4, 2025, noting that neither the Panama Canal's own website nor historical research shows anything close to 38,000 deaths. Even counting every worker of every nationality, Trump's number is nearly seven times the actual toll, and the canal was not "built by Americans" in any labor sense: the workforce that died building it was overwhelmingly Caribbean. The only death toll in the tens of thousands belongs to the failed French construction effort of the 1880s, which lost more than 22,000 workers, and they were not Americans either. Trump had already used the inflated 38,000 figure in his January 2025 inaugural address, where FactCheck.org debunked it citing historian David McCullough's research putting white American deaths at about 350.

"The claim that 38,000 Americans died building the Panama Canal is not supported by historical records." — CBS News Confirmed fact check, March 5, 2025