Donald Trump's rally at Madison Square Garden, fact-checked

Former President Donald Trump hammered home an anti-immigration theme in his closing argument to voters on Oct. 27 at Madison Square Garden in New York City.

But before Trump spoke, the event made headlines for a series of racist jokes by comedian Tony Hinchcliffe. He called Puerto Rico an “island of waste” and discredited Black Americans, Latinos and Jewish people. Democrats and at least two Republicans in Florida, including Senator Rick Scottquickly condemned Hinchcliffe’s comments 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 meeting addressing the comedian’s comment about Puerto Rico.

At the meeting, Trump, the Republican presidential candidate, said he was presiding over the most secure border in American history.he didn’t), that the Federal Emergency Management Agency did not provide hurricane relief because the government spent its money on illegally bringing in immigrants (that didn’t happen) and that foreign nations emptied their prisons and sent convicts to the United States (they are not).

A group of speakers preceded Trump, including Trump’s running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, 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, R-La., Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White, professional wrestler Hulk Hogan, entrepreneur Elon Musk and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

Carlson fretted about Harris’ potential win, which would make “California’s first ever Samoan, Malaysian, low-IQ Malaysian former prosecutor president.” Harris identifies as a black woman of multicultural descent; her mother was born in India and her father was born in Jamaica.

Trump nevertheless said that the Republican Party he leads “has really become the party of inclusivity, and there is something very nice about that.”

Trump’s choice of New York City as a rallying point may have challenged the political logic; New York, as a state, voted for the Democratic candidate for president decadesalthough Madison Square Garden has hosted major political events for more than a century. His appearance in New York City also put Trump in the backyard of officials he has frequently criticized, including District Attorney Alvin Bragg who 34 count felony conviction against Trump for falsifying company records.

Here are eight claims we fact-checked, with the first being four claims about immigration.

Trump said Harris has “imported criminal migrants from prisons, mental hospitals and psychiatric institutions around the world, from Venezuela to Congo.”

Pants on fire! There is no proof that countries are emptying their prisons – or mental institutions – and allowing people to migrate illegally to the US

Immigration officials arrested about 108,000 noncitizens with criminal convictions (both in the U.S. and abroad) between fiscal years 2021 and 2024, federal data shows. This applies to people arrested in and between ports of entry. Not everyone was allowed in.

Trump said: “I will invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.”

Legal experts told it 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 Enemies Act allows a president to quickly deport non-citizens without due process if they come from a country at war with the US.

The law has only been used three times in US history, all during wartime. The last time this law was enforced 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 enslaved. They have come through the open border and are gone.”

This is one distortion of federal data on migrant children.

A federal oversight from August report on unaccompanied minors released from federal government custody, it states that Immigration and Customs Enforcement had not issued a “Notice to Appear” to more than 291,000 unaccompanied minors as of May. (A message that should appear is a charging document authorities issue and file with immigration court to initiate removal proceedings.)

The report states that unaccompanied children “who do not appear in court are at greater risk of human trafficking, exploitation or forced labor.” The report does not state how many children were actually trafficked.

The report led Republican lawmakers and conservative news media to say that ICE “lost‘the children or that they are’missing.” But that’s not what it said.

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

False.

As a U.S. senator in 2018, Kamala Harris criticized the Trump administration’s immigration policies, including ones that led to family separations at the border. In that context, Harris said the function of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement needs to be reexamined and that “we should probably even consider starting from scratch.” But Harris did not say there should be no immigration enforcement. In 2018, Harris also said that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had a role and should exist.

Trump said Harris “cast the decisive vote that caused the worst inflation in the history of our country. It has cost a typical American family more than $3,000 in a short time, but well over $30,000 in the last three years.”

Mostly false. Harris cast the deciding vote on the motion to proceed to a final vote in the Senate on the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act, a bill aimed at alleviating the coronavirus pandemic.

An ideologically diverse cross-section of economists agree that the American Rescue Plan added a few percentage points to inflation but did not cause the larger spike. The main causes, they said, were supply chain disruptions due to the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Year-on-year inflation peaked at around 9% in 2022. That makes it the worst annual rate in four decades, but not the worst in American history.

The $28,000 increase is a credible estimate of how much additional households have paid for purchases since Biden took office. But that figure ignores the fact that wage increases have offset much — or, depending on the time frame, all — of those higher costs.

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

The statement needs clarification, so we reviewed it Mostly true.

Harris’ history on the subject dates back to when she was California’s attorney general and represented the state’s Corrections Department when it tried to block a lower court order requiring the agency to perform gender confirmation surgery to a transgender prisoner.

During her run for president in the 2019 Democratic primaries, Harris said she supported access to gender-affirming surgeries for people in prisons and immigration detentions. Harris has not campaigned on the issue in 2024, but when asked about it during a Fox News interview on Oct. 16, she said, “I will follow the law.”

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

We found no data on gender confirmation surgeries in immigration detention.

Trump said Harris “promised to confiscate your guns” and “endorsed a total ban on handgun ownership.”

This deforms Harris’ current position.

Like one Harris, candidate for the 2019 presidential election, said: “I support a mandatory gun buyback program” for assault weapons. She no longer supports this policy, which would not have applied 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 has urged states to pass red flag laws and supported federal gun safety legislation, including funding for mental health resources and school safety.

There is evidence that she supported a gun ban, but that was limited to one city almost twenty 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 pistols. Voters approved the measure, but the courts overturned it.

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

Trump may have meant 4.5%, a figure cited in some media accounts sympathetic to Trump. But even that lower figure would be misleading.

The comment was part of a discussion by Trump about a conversation he had with ABC News’ David Muir during the September 10 presidential debate in Philadelphia, in which Muir said crime had decreased and Trump insisted crime had increased.

Overall, the FBI’s annual data shows a reject in violent crime between 2020 and 2023. Multiple analyzes of non-governmental crime statistics also show that violent crime decreased in 2023 and 2024.

That was the case in October reported that the FBI had updated its violent crime data to be more complete, a standard annual process. The updated data led some commentators to say this meant crime had increased between 2021 and 2022; instead of falling 2.1%, some said, it rose 4.5% between those two years, with thousands of new violent crimes.

However, 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, which Asher and other crime experts say unreliable as the FBI changed its crime reporting system that year and local police compliance plummeted. (The issue has been resolved in the annual data for later years.)

Asher described the revisions released in October as unusually large, and for unclear reasons. But him wrote that “FBI estimates for 2023 show continued small declines in violent crime, with historically large declines in homicides.”