Former President Donald Trump broached anti-immigrant themes during his closing argument address to voters at Madison Square Garden in New York City on October 27th.
WATCH: President Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally highlights crude, racist insults
But before Trump spoke, the event featured a series of racist jokes by comedian Tony Hinchcliffe. He called Puerto Rico a “trash island” and looked down on black Americans, Latinos, and Jews. At least two Florida Republicans, including Democrat and Sen. Rick Scott, quickly condemned Hinchcliffe’s comments about Puerto Rico.
“This joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or his campaign,” Daniel Alvarez, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, said in a statement after the rally, referring to the comedian’s comments about Puerto Rico.
At a rally, Republican presidential candidate Trump said he was in charge of the most secure border in U.S. history (which he wasn’t) and that the Federal Emergency Management Agency was responsible for not providing hurricane relief. He said this was because the government was using funds to bring immigrants into the country. People were entering the US illegally (which wasn’t the case) and foreign countries were emptying their prisons and sending prisoners to the US (which wasn’t the case).
President Trump’s running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), President Trump’s sons Eric and Don Jr., Trump’s wife Melania, and daughter-in-law and co-chair of the Republican National Committee. A group of speakers, including Lara Trump, took to the stage before Trump. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana), Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White, professional wrestler Hulk Hogan, entrepreneur Elon Musk, and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
Carlson quipped about Harris’ chances of winning, saying, “We will be the first Samoan-Malaysian and former California prosecutor with a low IQ to be elected president.” Harris identifies as a black woman of multicultural descent. Her mother was born in India and her father was born in Jamaica.
Still, Trump said his Republican Party “has become a really inclusive party, and there’s something really great about that.”
President Trump’s choice of New York City as the venue for his rally may have called into question the political logic. Madison Square Garden has hosted major political events for more than a century, and as a state New York has voted for Democratic presidential candidates for decades. Trump’s appearance in New York City brought officials he has frequently criticized, including District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who was convicted of 34 felonies against Trump for falsifying business records. It was decided to be placed in the backyard of
Here are eight claims we fact-checked:
immigration
Trump said Harris has “imported criminal immigrants from prisons, jails, psychiatric hospitals, and psychiatric hospitals around the world, from Venezuela to the Congo.”
My pants are on fire! There is no evidence that countries are emptying prisons and psychiatric hospitals or illegally immigrating people to the United States.
According to federal data, from fiscal years 2021 to 2024, immigration authorities arrested approximately 108,000 noncitizens with criminal convictions (whether in the United States or abroad). This accounts for people stopping at ports of entry and between ports of entry. Not everyone was allowed in.
President Trump said he would “invoke the Alien Enemies 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 doing so would lead to legal problems.
The Alien Enemies Act allows the president to quickly expel noncitizens without due process if they are from a country at war with the United States.
This law has only been applied three times in U.S. history, all during wartime. The law was last invoked during World War II, when it was used to place non-citizens from Japan, Germany, and Italy in concentration camps.
President Trump said, “Think about it: 325,000 children are missing, dead, sex slaves, slaves. They came through an open border.” , is gone.”
This is a distortion of federal data on immigrant children.
As of May, Immigration and Customs Enforcement had released more than 291,000 unaccompanied minors from federal custody, according to an August federal monitoring report on unaccompanied minors released from federal custody. A “notice to appear” was not sent. (A notice to appear is a complaint issued by the authorities and submitted to the immigration court to begin removal proceedings.)
WATCH: As President Trump stokes fear of crime and immigration, Harris approaches voters from across the aisle
The report states that unaccompanied children “do not appear in court, but are considered to be at high risk of trafficking, exploitation, and forced labor.” The report does not say how many children were actually trafficked.
In response to the report, Republican lawmakers and conservative media outlets claimed that ICE had “lost” or “missing” the children. But that wasn’t the case.
President Trump said Harris had vowed to “abolish” U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
error.
In 2018, while a U.S. senator, Kamala Harris criticized the Trump administration’s immigration policies, including policies that led to the separation of families at the border. In this regard, Harris said that the functions of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement should be reconsidered and “perhaps even consider starting from scratch.” But Harris doesn’t say we shouldn’t crack down on immigration. In 2018, Harris also said that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has a role and should exist.
economy
President Trump said Harris “cast the decisive vote that led to the worst inflation in our nation’s history.” She has cost the typical American family more than $3,000 in a short period of time, but over the past three years it has cost her more than $30,000. ”
Most are wrong. Harris cast the tie-breaking vote on a motion to advance the coronavirus pandemic relief bill, the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, to a final Senate vote.
Ideologically diverse economists agree that the American Rescue Plan boosted inflation by a few percentage points, but did not cause broader inflation. They say the main causes are supply chain disruptions due to the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The year-on-year inflation rate peaked at about 9% in 2022. This would be the worst annual rate in 40 years, but not the worst in U.S. history.
This $28,000 increase is a reliable estimate of how much additional households have spent on purchases since Biden took office. But this figure ignores that rising wages are smoothing out a significant portion, or in some time frames, all of these cost increases.
Read more: U.S. inflation falls to 2.4%, lowest in three years; some price pressures remain
LGBTQ+ issues
President Trump said Harris “called for free gender reassignment surgery for illegal aliens detained at taxpayer expense.”
We rated this statement as “Mostly True” because it requires clarification.
Harris’ background on the subject is that she was California’s attorney general, where she represented the state’s Department of Corrections in an attempt to block a lower court order requiring officials to perform gender reassignment surgery on transgender inmates. Back in the day.
When running for president in the 2019 Democratic primary, Harris said she supported gender reassignment surgery for people in prisons and immigration detention centers. Harris is not campaigning on the issue in 2024, but when asked about the issue in an Oct. 16 interview on Fox News, she said, “I follow the law.”
Federal law requires prisons to provide inmates with necessary medical care, and several courts have ruled that this includes gender-affirming medical care, including surgery. Despite these court rulings, access to gender reassignment surgery in prisons is limited, with only a small number of transgender inmates undergoing surgery in federal prisons, just two.
No records were found of gender reassignment surgeries performed in immigration detention centers.
crime and guns
President Trump said Harris “promised to confiscate guns” and “supported a complete ban on handgun ownership.”
This distorts Harris’ current position.
As a 2019 presidential primary candidate, Harris said she “supports a forced gun buyback program” regarding assault weapons. She no longer supports this policy. That’s because the policy does not apply to handguns, the most popular firearm.
Read more: DNC office shooting suspect had more than 120 guns in his Arizona home, authorities say
Harris’ campaign told the New York Times that Harris supports a ban on assault weapons, but not a mandate to sell them to the federal government. As vice president, Harris encouraged states to pass red flag laws and supported federal gun safety legislation, including funding for mental health and school safety resources.
There is evidence that she supported gun bans, but that was limited to one city nearly 20 years ago. In 2005, when Harris was district attorney in San Francisco, she supported a ballot measure that would have prohibited city residents from owning handguns. Voters approved the measure, but a court struck it down.
“Your crimes are extraordinarily serious,” Trump said, adding that newly released statistics show “crime has increased by 45 percent” under the Biden-Harris administration.
Mr. Trump may have meant 4.5%, but that number has been cited by some in the media sympathetic to Mr. Trump. But even that low number can be misleading.
The comment was part of President Trump’s conversation with ABC News’ David Muir during the Sept. 10 presidential debate in Philadelphia, where Muir said crime was on the decline. Trump claimed that crime is on the rise.
In general, the FBI’s annual data shows a decline in violent crime from 2020 to 2023. Multiple non-governmental crime statistical analyzes also found a decline in violent crime in 2023 and 2024.
In October, it was reported that the FBI updated its violent crime data to be more complete as a standard annual process. Following the latest data, some commentators said this meant crime had increased from 2021 to 2022. Thousands of new violent crimes occurred, and some say there has been a 4.5% increase over the past two years, rather than a 2.1% decline.
But crime experts, including Jeff Asher of JH Analytics, said this is a statistical artifact.
That’s because the baseline for this comparison is 2021 data, but Asher and other crime experts say that’s because the FBI switched its crime reporting system that year, and local police compliance plummeted. It says this data is unreliable. (This issue has been corrected in later annual data.)
Asher explained that the revised version released in October was unusually large, and it’s unclear why. But, he wrote, “the FBI’s 2023 estimates show that violent crime continues to decline modestly, and homicides continue to decline at a historically large rate.”
