Fact check: Donald Trump rally at Madison Square Garden in New York | 2024 US Election News

Former President Donald Trump emphasized the anti-immigration theme in his closing speech to voters on October 27 at New York’s Madison Square Garden.

But before Trump spoke, the event made headlines after a series of racist jokes by comedian Tony Hinchcliffe. He called Puerto Rico a “garbage island” and disparaged Black Americans, Latinos 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,” Danielle Alvarez, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, said in a statement after the rally, in which she addressed the comedian’s comments about Puerto Rico.

During the rally, Trump, the Republican Party’s presidential candidate, declared that he was guarding the most secure border in U.S. history (he didn’t do it), that the Federal Emergency Management Agency failed to provide hurricane relief because the government spent its money on illegally bringing immigrants into the country (that didn’t happen) and that foreign nations are emptying their prisons and sending convicts to the U.S. (they are not).

Trump was preceded by a group of speakers, including his running mate, Senator J.D. Vance, Trump’s sons Eric and Don Jr, Trump’s wife Melania, his daughter-in-law and Republican National Committee co-chairman Lara Trump, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Mike Johnson, Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White, wrestler Hulk Hogan, entrepreneur Elon Musk and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

Carlson grumbled about Harris’ potential victory marking “the first-ever former Samoan, Malaysian, and low-IQ prosecutor to be elected president.” Harris identifies as a black woman of multicultural descent; her mother was born in India and her father in Jamaica.

Still, Trump said the Republican Party, which he leads, “has really become an inclusive party, and there’s something very nice about that.”

Trump’s choice of New York as a rally site may have challenged political logic; New York as a state has voted for the Democratic presidential candidate for decades, although Madison Square Garden has hosted major political events for over a century. The appearance in New York also put Trump on the back foot 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, four of which are 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! Is no evidence that countries are emptying their prisons – or mental institutions – and sending people to migrate illegally to the US.

Federal data shows that immigration officials arrested approximately 108,000 foreign nationals with criminal convictions (in the U.S. or abroad) in fiscal years 2021-2024. This applies to people detained 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 carry out mass deportations and that invoking the law would lead to legal challenges.

The Alien Enemies Act allows the president to quickly deport foreigners without due process if they come from a country at war with the US.

This law has only been used three times in U.S. history, and all of those were during war. The law was last invoked during World War II, when it was used to place non-Japanese, German and Italian citizens in internment camps.

Trump said: “Think about this: 325,000 children are missing, dead, sex slaves or slaves. They crossed the open border and disappeared.”

This is distortion federal data on migrant children.

An August federal oversight report on unaccompanied minors released from federal custody found that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had not issued a “notice to appear” to more than 291,000 unaccompanied minors through May. (A Notice to Appear is a charging document issued by the authorities and filed with the Immigration Court to begin removal proceedings.)

The report noted that unaccompanied children “who do not appear in court are considered to be at greater risk of trafficking, exploitation or forced labor.” The report did not specify how many children were actually trafficked.

As a result of the report, Republican lawmakers and conservative news outlets claimed that ICE had “lost” the children or that they were “missing.” But that’s not what was said.

Trump said Harris “vowed to abolish” U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement

FALSEHOOD.

As a U.S. senator in 2018, Kamala Harris criticized the Trump administration’s immigration policies, including policies leading to family separation at the border. In this context, Harris said that the function of US ICE needs to be re-examined and that “we probably even need to think about starting from scratch.” But Harris didn’t say there shouldn’t be immigration enforcement. In 2018, Harris also said that ICE had a role to play and should exist.

Economy

Trump said Harris “cast the deciding vote that caused the worst inflation in the history of our country.” It cost the typical American family over $3,000 in the short term, but over $30,000 in the last three years.”

Mostly false. Harris cast the deciding vote on a motion to proceed to a final Senate vote on the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, the coronavirus relief bill.

An ideologically diverse cross-section of economists agree that the American Rescue Plan added a few percentage points to inflation but did not cause a broader spike. They claim supply chain disruptions caused by the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine were the main causes.

Year-on-year inflation peaked in 2022 at around 9%. That makes it the worst annual rate in 40 years, but not the worst in U.S. history.

The $28,000 increase is a reliable estimate of the additional amount households have paid for purchases since Biden took office. However, this figure does not take into account the fact that wage increases have offset much of – or, depending on the time frame, all of – the increased costs.

LGBTQ+ issues

Trump said Harris “called for free gender reassignment surgery for detained illegal aliens at taxpayer expense.”

The statement requires clarification, so we have rated it Mostly true.

Harris’s history on the issue dates back to her time as California’s attorney general and representing the state department of corrections, which sought to block a lower court ruling requiring the agency to perform gender-affirming surgery on a transgender inmate.

During her presidential bid in the 2019 Democratic primary, Harris stated that she supported access to gender-affirming surgery for people in prisons and immigration detention centers. Harris has not campaigned on the issue in 2024, but when asked about it during an Oct. 16 interview with Fox News, she replied: “I will obey the law.”

Federal law requires prisons to provide inmates with necessary medical care, and several courts have ruled that gender-affirming care, including surgery, is included. Despite these court rulings, access to gender-affirming surgery in prisons is limited, and the number of transgender inmates in federal prisons who have received this surgery is a minuscule two.

We found no data on gender-affirming surgery being performed in immigration detention centers.

Crime and weapons

Trump said Harris was “pledged to confiscate your guns” and “supported a complete ban on handguns.”

This distorts Harris’ current position.

as Harris said that the main candidate for president in 2019: “I support a mandatory gun buyback program” for assault weapons. He no longer supports the policy, which would not apply to handguns, the most popular firearm.

The Harris campaign told The New York Times that it supports a ban on assault weapons but does not require that they be sold to the federal government. As vice president, Harris pushed for states to pass red flag laws and supported federal gun safety legislation that included funding for mental health and school safety resources.

There is evidence that she supported a gun ban, but it was confined to one city almost 20 years ago. In 2005, when Harris was district attorney in San Francisco, she supported a ballot measure that would have banned city residents from owning handguns. Voters approved this solution, but the courts rejected it.

Trump said, “Your crime is through the roof,” and that newly released statistics showed that under the Biden-Harris administration, “crime is up 45 percent.”

Trump may have been referring to 4.5 percent, which is a number cited by some media outlets sympathetic to Trump. However, even this lower number would be misleading.

The comment was part of Trump’s discussion of an exchange he had with ABC News’ David Muir during the Sept. 10 presidential debate in Philadelphia, during which Muir said crime was down and Trump insisted crime was up.

Overall, the FBI’s annual data showed that: decrease in 2020–2023 violent crime. Numerous analyzes of non-governmental crime statistics also show that the number of violent crimes decreased 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 data has led some commentators to say this means crime will increase in 2021–2022; Some argued that instead of falling 2.1 percent, it rose 4.5 percent over those two years, representing thousands of new violent crimes.

However, forensic experts, including Jeff Asher of JH Analytics, said it was a statistical artifact.

That’s because the benchmark for this comparison is 2021 data, which Asher and other crime experts say is uncertain as the FBI changed its crime reporting systems this year and compliance by local police departments plummeted. (The problem has been corrected in annual data for later years.)

Asher described the patches released in October as unusually large and for unclear reasons. But he wrote that “FBI estimates for 2023 indicate a continued modest decline in violent crimes amid historically large declines in murders.”