Former President Donald Trump hit on an anti-immigration theme in his closing arguments pitch to voters at Madison Square Garden in New York City on October 27.
But before Trump spoke, the event drew headlines for a series of racist jokes from comedian Tony Hinchcliffe. He called Puerto Rico a “trash island” and denigrated black Americans, Latinos, and Jews. Democrats, including Senator Rick Scott, and at least two Florida Republicans quickly condemned Hinchcliffe’s remarks about Puerto Rico.
“This joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign,” Daniel Alvarez, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, said in a statement after the rally, addressing the comedian’s comments about Puerto Rico.
At the rally, Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, said he presided over the most secure border in United States history (he didn’t), that the Federal Emergency Management Agency did not provide hurricane relief because the government had Money spent on bringing back immigrants. The country illegally (didn’t happen) and that foreign countries were emptying their prisons and sending criminals to the US (they weren’t).
A slate of speakers preceded Trump, including Trump’s running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance, Trump’s sons Eric and Don Jr., Trump’s wife Melania, his daughter-in-law and Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump, U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White, professional wrestler Hulk Hogan, entrepreneur Elon Musk and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
Carlson spoke of Harris’ potential victory as “the first Samoan, Malaysian, low-IQ former California prosecutor to ever be elected president.” Harris identifies as a multicultural black woman. His mother was born in India and his father was born in Jamaica.
Trump nevertheless said that the Republican Party he leads has “become really a party of inclusion, and there’s something very good about that”.
Trump’s choice of New York City as the venue for the rally may challenge political logic. New York, as a state, has voted for the Democratic candidate for president for decades, although Madison Square Garden has hosted major political events for more than a century. The appearance in New York City also put Trump in the back yard of officials he has often criticized, including District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who received a 34-count felony conviction against Trump for falsifying business records. .
Here are eight claims we fact-checked, four of which are about immigration.
Immigration
Trump said Harris imported criminal immigrants from prisons and jails, insane asylums and mental institutions around the world, from Venezuela to the Congo.
Pants on fire! There is no evidence that countries are emptying their prisons — or mental institutions — and sending people to the United States illegally.
Federal data shows that immigration officials arrested about 108,000 noncitizens with criminal convictions (whether in the U.S. or abroad) from fiscal years 2021 to 2024. It accounts for people stopped at and between ports of entry. Not everyone was allowed in.
Trump said: “I will invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.”
Legal experts told PolitiFact that Trump does not have the authority to use the law to enact mass deportations and that his request would lead to legal challenges.
The Alien Enemies Act allows the president to immediately deport non-citizens without further action if they are from a country at war with the United States.
This law has only been used three times in American history, all during wars. The last time the act was used was during World War II, and it was used to place non-citizens in concentration camps in Japan, Germany, and Italy.
Trump said: “Think about it: 325,000 children are missing, dead, sex slaves, or slaves. They came from an open border and are gone.
This is a distortion of federal data about immigrant children.
An August federal oversight report on unaccompanied minors released from federal custody stated that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had not provided “notices to appear” to more than 291,000 unaccompanied minors as of May. was (A notice to appear is a charging document issued by authorities and must be filed with the immigration court to begin removal proceedings.)
The report states that unaccompanied children “who do not appear in court are considered to be at high risk of trafficking, exploitation or forced labour”. The report did not say how many children were actually trafficked.
The report prompted Republican lawmakers and conservative news outlets to say that ICE had “lost” the children or that they were “missing.” But it is not said.
Trump said Harris pledged to “dismantle” U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
liar
As a U.S. senator in 2018, Kamala Harris criticized the Trump administration’s immigration policies, including one that led to the separation of families at the border. In this context, Harris said that the function of USICE should be reevaluated and that “we need to think about maybe starting from scratch.” But Harris did not say that immigration should not be enforced. In 2018, Harris also said that ICE has and should have a role.
The economy
“Harris cast the deciding vote that started the worst inflation in our nation’s history,” Trump said. It cost the typical American family more than $3,000 in the short term, but more than $30,000 over the last three years”.
Mostly wrong. Harris cast the tie-breaking vote on a motion to advance the Senate to a final vote on the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, a coronavirus pandemic relief bill.
An ideologically diverse cross-section of economists agrees that the American rescue plan raised inflation by a few percentage points, but not by a wide margin. He says the main reasons for this were supply chain disruptions from the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Year-on-year inflation is projected to reach around 9% in 2022. That made it the worst annual rate in 40 years, but not the worst in US history.
The $28,000 increase is a credible estimate of the extra money households have paid for purchases since Biden took office. But this figure ignores that wage growth has been much higher – or, depending on the time frame, all of those increased costs.
LGBTQ+ issues
Trump said Harris “called for free sex-change operations on illegal aliens in detention at taxpayer expense.”
The statement needs clarification, so we rated it mostly true.
Harris’ history on the subject goes back to when she was California’s attorney general and represented the state’s Department of Corrections as it tried to block a lower court order that allowed the agency to house a transgender inmate. Gender confirmation surgery was required to be provided.
During her run for president in the 2019 Democratic primary, Harris said she favored access to gender confirmation surgery for people in prisons and immigration detention. Harris did not campaign on the issue in 2024, but when asked about it during an Oct. 16 interview with Fox News, she said: “I will follow the law.”
Federal law requires that prisons provide necessary medical care to inmates, and several courts have ruled that gender-affirming care includes surgery. Despite these court rulings, access to gender-affirming surgery in prisons remains limited, and the number of transgender inmates in federal prisons who have received it is two.
We found no records of gender-affirming surgeries in immigration detention.
Crime and guns
Trump said Harris “promised to confiscate your guns” and “endorsed a total ban on handgun ownership”.
This distorts Harris’ current position.
As a 2019 presidential primary candidate, Harris said: “I support a mandatory gun buyback program for assault weapons. She no longer supports that policy, which applies to handguns, the most popular. Not on firearms.
The Harris campaign told The New York Times that it supports banning assault weapons but not requiring them to be sold to the federal government. As vice president, Harris has urged states to pass red flag laws and supported federal gun safety legislation that includes funding for mental health and school security resources. is
There is evidence that he supported gun bans, but it was limited to one city about 20 years ago. When Harris was San Francisco District Attorney in 2005, she supported a ballot measure that would have banned city residents from owning handguns. Voters approved the measure, but the courts struck it down.
Trump said: “Your crime is through the roof” and newly released statistics show that “crime is up 45 percent” under the Biden-Harris administration.
Trump may mean 4.5 percent, a figure cited by some Trump-sympathetic media accounts. But even lower figures would be misleading.
The comment was part of an exchange Trump made with ABC News’ David Moyer during a Sept. 10 presidential debate in Philadelphia, in which Moyer said crime had fallen and Trump insisted crime had fallen. has increased.
In general, the FBI’s annual data shows a decline in violent crime from 2020 to 2023. Analyzes of several unofficial crime statistics also found that violent crime declined in 2023 and 2024.
In October, it was reported that the FBI had updated its violent crime data to make it more complete, a standard annual practice. The latest figures have led some observers to say that this means crime has increased between 2021 and 2022. Instead of a 2.1 percent decrease, some said, it rose 4.5 percent with thousands of new violent crimes between those two years.
However, criminologists, including Jeff Asher of JH Analytics, said this is a statistical pattern.
That’s because the comparison is based on data from 2021, which Asher and other crime experts say is unreliable because the FBI changed its crime reporting system that year and local police departments Compliance decreased. (The problem has been fixed in annual data for later years.)
Asher described the revisions issued in October as unusually large and for unclear reasons. But he wrote that “the FBI’s projections for 2023 show continued small declines in violent crime that historically have seen large declines in homicides.”