PolitiFact’s unwillingness to give Republicans “true” ratings for true statements continued on Monday when Samantha Putterman only gave Rep. Brandon Gill a “half true” rating for his true claim that “The Dignity Act is mass amnesty.”
The gist of Putterman’s reasoning is that nobody can agree on what “amnesty” means. In the “If your time is short summary,” she writes, “‘Amnesty’ has no agreed-upon definition in immigration debates. The term can be interpreted narrowly as granting citizenship to immigrants in the U.S. illegally, or broadly to mean any government policy allowing immigrants in the U.S. illegally to remain in the country.”
She then adds, “There’s a pool of millions of people who potentially could benefit from the Dignity Act, which would allow them to earn legal status if they met certain criteria, including paying $7,000 in fines and passing criminal background checks.” 
Finally, Putterman claims, “For some, the newly created legal status would be renewable. For other immigrants brought to the U.S. as children before 2021, the legislation could allow them to eventually be eligible for U.S. citizenship.”
Later in the body of the article, Putterman cites competing experts, “‘The Dignity Act does not grant amnesty, which, to me, means a universal reprieve without any consideration to a fee or process to be right with the law,’ said Christian Penichet-Paul, assistant vice president of policy and advocacy at the National Immigration Forum, an immigrant advocacy group. ‘People have to earn their legal status under the bill and, except for Dreamers, there is no opportunity to earn U.S. citizenship. People can disagree with the merits of the bill without calling it something it is not.’”
By contrast, “Steven Camarota, research director at the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that favors low immigration levels, says amnesty ‘almost always’ has conditions, and compared the Dignity Act with Reagan’s Immigration Reform and Control Act. ‘They are very alike,’ Camarota said. ‘They are both giving green cards to millions of people who are here without formal authorization, and (the IRCA) also had some requirements and fines.’”
If Person A said a triangle has three sides and Person B said a triangle has four sides, nobody would just throw their arms up in the air and say, “Nobody can agree on what the definition of a triangle is, so Person A is half-true.” Yet, that is exactly what Putterman did.
According to dictionary.com, “amnesty” means “a general pardon for offenses, especially political offenses, against a government, often granted before any trial or conviction” or “an act of forgiveness for past offenses, especially to a class of persons as a whole” or “a forgetting or overlooking of any past offense.”
Likewise, “amnesty” etymologically comes from the same Greek source as “amnesia,” including “a,” meaning “not,” and “mnestis,” meaning “remembrance.” In this case, the government is choosing to forget the offense of entering the country illegally.
If Dignity Act proponents want to put the “conditional” adjective in front of “amnesty”—as opposed to “blanket”—they can, but it is still amnesty, and either way Gill deserved a true rating.
