By james art Former President Donald Trump made an anti-immigration theme his final speech to voters on October 27 at Madison Square Garden in New York.
But before Trump spoke, the event made headlines for a series of racist jokes by comedian Tony Hinchcliffe. He called Puerto Rico a “garbage island” and disparaged black Americans, Hispanics and Jews. Democrats and at least two Florida Republicans, including Sen. Rick Scott, 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 Trump campaign adviser, said in a statement after the rally, addressing the comedian’s comment about Puerto Rico.
At the rally, Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, said he ran the most secure border in United States history (he didn’t), that the Federal Emergency Management Agency didn’t provide hurricane relief because the government spent its money, to bring immigrants into a country illegally (it didn’t) and that foreign nations are emptying their prisons and sending convicts to the US (they aren’t).
A line-up of speakers preceded Trump, including Trump’s vice president, Sen. JD 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, Executive Ultimate Fighting Championship director Dana White, professional wrestler Hulk Hogan, entrepreneur Elon Musk and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
Carlson boasted of Harris’ potential victory, noting “the first former California prosecutor from Samoa, Malaysia, with a low IQ ever to be elected president.” Harris identifies as a black woman of multicultural background; her mother was born in India and her father was born in Jamaica.
However, Trump said the Republican Party he leads has “really become the party of inclusion, and there’s something very good about that.”
Trump’s choice of New York as a rallying point may have challenged 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 also put Trump in the backyard of officials he has often criticized, including District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who obtained a 34-count conviction against Trump for falsifying business records.
Here are eight claims we fact-checked, leading with four about immigration.
Immigration
Trump said Harris “imported criminal migrants from prisons and jails, insane asylums and mental institutions from all over 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 migrate illegally to the US.
Immigration officials arrested about 108,000 noncitizens with criminal convictions (whether in the U.S. or abroad) from fiscal years 2021 to 2024, federal data show. This accounts for people stopped at and between ports of entry. Not all were admitted.
Trump said, “I’m going to invoke the Alien Enemy Act of 1798.”
Legal experts told PolitiFact that Trump does not have the authority to use the law to carry out mass deportations and that invoking it would lead to legal challenges.
The Alien Enemy Act allows the president to quickly deport non-citizens without due process if they are from a country at war with the United States.
The law has only been used three times in US history, all during wartime. The last time the law was used was during World War II, and it was used to place non-citizens from Japan, Germany, and Italy in internment camps.
Trump said: “Think about this: 325,000 children are missing, dead, sex slaves or slaves. They went through the open border and they are gone.”
This is a distortion of federal data on migrant children.
An August federal oversight report on unaccompanied minors released from federal custody said Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had not served “notices to appear” on more than 291,000 unaccompanied minors as of May. (The notice that must appear is a charging document that the authorities issue and file with the immigration court to begin removal proceedings.)
The report said that unaccompanied children “who do not appear before the courts are considered to be at higher 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 had “disappeared.” But it is not what it says.
Trump said Harris had “promised to dismantle” US Immigration and Customs Enforcement
False.
As a US senator in 2018, Kamala Harris criticized the Trump administration’s immigration policies, including policies that have resulted in families being separated at the border. In this context, Harris said that the US ICE function needs to be re-examined and that “we should probably even consider starting from scratch”. But Harris stopped short of saying there should be no immigration crackdown. In 2018, Harris also said that ICE has a role and should exist.
economy
Trump said Harris “cast the deciding vote that started the worst inflation in the history of our country. It has cost the typical American family over $3,000 in a short period of time, but over $30,000 over the past three years.”
Mostly false. Harris cast the deciding vote on the proposal to move to a final vote in the Senate on the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, a bill to ease the coronavirus pandemic.
Ideologically diverse economists agree that the US bailout added a few percentage points to inflation but did not cause a broader spike. They say the main causes are supply chain disruptions from the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Annual inflation peaked in 2022 at around 9 percent. 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 amount households have paid for purchases since Biden took office. But that figure ignores the fact that wage gains have offset much—or depending on the time frame, all—of those increased costs.
LGBTQ+ issues
Trump said Harris “called for free gender reassignment surgeries on illegally detained aliens at taxpayer expense.”
The statement needs clarification, so we’ve rated it mostly true.
Harris’ history on the subject dates back to when she was California’s attorney general, representing the state’s Department of Corrections as it tried to block a lower court order requiring the agency to perform sex-confirmation surgery on an inmate of transgender origin.
During his run for president in the 2019 Democratic primary, Harris said he supported access to gender confirmation surgeries for people in prisons and immigration detention. Harris hasn’t campaigned on the issue in 2024, but when asked about it during an Oct. 16 Fox News interview, she said, “I’m going to follow the law.”
Federal law requires prisons to provide necessary medical care to inmates, and several courts have ruled that includes gender-affirming care, including surgery. Despite these court rulings, access to gender reassignment surgery in prisons is limited, and the number of transgender inmates in federal prisons who have received it is a paltry two.
We found no records of gender confirmation surgeries being performed in immigration detention.
Crime and guns
Trump said Harris had “promised to confiscate your guns” and “endorsed a total ban on handguns.”
This distorts Harris’ current position.
As a 2019 presidential primary candidate, Harris said, “I support a mandatory buyback program” for combat weapons. She no longer supports that policy, which would not apply to handguns, the most popular 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 urged states to pass red flag laws and supported federal gun safety legislation that included funding for mental health and school security resources.
There is evidence that she supported a gun ban, but that was limited to one city nearly 20 years ago. In 2005, when Harris was San Francisco’s district attorney, she supported a ballot measure that would have banned city residents from owning handguns. Voters approved the measure, but the courts overturned it.
Trump said, “Your crime is endless” and that recently released statistics show that “crime is up 45 percent” under the Biden-Harris administration.
Trump may have meant to say 4.5 percent, a figure that has been cited in some Trump-sympathetic media outlets. But even this lower figure would be misleading.
That comment was part of Trump’s discussion of an exchange he had with David Muir of ABC News during the Sept. 10 presidential debate in Philadelphia, in which Muir said crime is down and Trump insisted crime is up.
Overall, the FBI’s annual data shows a drop in violent crime from 2020 to 2023. Multiple analyzes of non-government crime statistics also found a drop in violent crime in 2023 and 2024.
In October, it was reported that the FBI had updated its violent crime data to be more complete, a standard annual process. The updated figures have led some commentators to say that this means crime has increased between 2021 and 2022; instead of falling 2.1 percent, some said, it rose 4.5 percent between those two years, with thousands of new serious crimes.
However, forensic experts, including JH Analytics’ Jeff Asher, said it was a statistical artifact.
That’s because the basis for that comparison is 2021 data, which Asher and other crime experts say is unreliable because the FBI changed crime reporting systems that year and compliance by local police departments plummeted. (The issue has been corrected in annual data for subsequent years.)
Asher described the revisions published in October as unusually large and for unclear reasons. But he wrote that “FBI estimates for 2023 show a continued small decline in violent crime with a historically large decline in homicides.”