Fact-check: Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally in New York City | US Election 2024 News

Former President Donald Trump hammered residence an anti-immigration theme in his closing argument pitch to voters on October 27 at New York Metropolis’s Madison Sq. Backyard.

However earlier than Trump spoke, the occasion made headlines for a sequence of racist jokes by comic Tony Hinchcliffe. He referred to as Puerto Rico an “island of rubbish” and disparaged Black Individuals, Latinos and Jewish individuals. Democrats and at the very least two Florida Republicans, together with Senator Rick Scott, swiftly condemned Hinchcliffe’s remarks about Puerto Rico.

“This joke doesn’t mirror the views of President Trump or the marketing campaign,” Danielle Alvarez, a senior adviser to the Trump marketing campaign mentioned in an announcement after the rally addressing the comic’s remark about Puerto Rico.

On the rally, Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, mentioned he presided over probably the most safe border in United States historical past (he didn’t), that the Federal Emergency Administration Company didn’t ship hurricane aid as a result of the federal government spent its cash bringing immigrants into the nation illegally (it didn’t) and that overseas nations have been emptying their prisons and sending convicts to the US (they aren’t).

A gaggle of audio system preceded Trump, together with Trump’s operating mate, Senator JD Vance, Trump’s sons Eric and Don Jr, Trump’s spouse, Melania, his daughter-in-law and Republican Nationwide Committee co-Chair Lara Trump, US Home Speaker Mike Johnson, Final Preventing Championship CEO Dana White, skilled wrestler Hulk Hogan, entrepreneur Elon Musk and former Fox Information host Tucker Carlson.

Carlson riffed about Harris’s potential victory marking “the primary Samoan, Malaysian, low-IQ former California prosecutor ever to be elected president”. Harris identifies as a Black lady of multicultural descent; her mom was born in India and her father was born in Jamaica.

Trump nonetheless mentioned the Republican Get together he leads “has actually change into the celebration of inclusion, and there’s one thing very good about that”.

Trump’s alternative of New York Metropolis as a rally website might have challenged political logic; New York, as a state, has voted for the Democratic candidate for president for many years, although Madison Sq. Backyard has hosted main political occasions for greater than a century. Showing in New York Metropolis additionally positioned Trump within the again yard of officers whom he ceaselessly has criticised, together with District Lawyer Alvin Bragg who obtained a 34-count felony conviction in opposition to Trump for falsifying enterprise information.

Listed here are eight claims we fact-checked, main with 4 about immigration.

Immigration

Trump mentioned Harris “has imported felony migrants from prisons and jails, insane asylums and psychological establishments from all world wide, from Venezuela to the Congo”.

Pants on Fireplace! There isn’t any proof that nations are emptying their prisons – or psychological establishments – and sending individuals to illegally migrate to the US.

Immigration officers arrested about 108,000 non-citizens with felony convictions (whether or not within the US or overseas) from fiscal years 2021 to 2024, federal knowledge exhibits. That accounts for individuals stopped at and between ports of entry. Not everybody was let in.

Trump mentioned: “I’ll invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.”

Authorized consultants advised PolitiFact that Trump doesn’t have the authority to make use of the regulation to hold out mass deportations and that invoking it could result in authorized challenges.

The Alien Enemies Act lets a president rapidly deport noncitizens with out due course of if they’re from a rustic at warfare with the US.

The regulation has been used solely thrice in US historical past, all throughout wartime. The final time the act was invoked was throughout World Battle II, and it was used to put non-citizens from Japan, Germany and Italy in internment camps.

Trump mentioned: “Consider this: 325,000 youngsters are lacking, useless, intercourse slaves, or slaves. They got here by means of the open border they usually’re gone.”

It is a distortion of federal knowledge about migrant youngsters.

An August federal oversight report about unaccompanied minors launched from federal authorities custody mentioned Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had not served a “Discover to Seem” to greater than 291,000 unaccompanied minors, as of Might. (A discover to look is a charging doc authorities difficulty and file in immigration courtroom to begin removing proceedings.)

The report mentioned unaccompanied youngsters “who don’t seem for courtroom are thought-about at greater danger for trafficking, exploitation, or compelled labour”. The report doesn’t state what number of youngsters have truly been trafficked.

The report led Republican legislators and conservative information retailers to say that ICE “misplaced” the youngsters or that they’re “lacking”. However that isn’t what it mentioned.

Trump mentioned Harris “vowed to abolish” US Immigration and Customs Enforcement

False.

As a US senator in 2018, Kamala Harris criticised the Trump administration’s immigration insurance policies, together with a coverage that led to household separations on the border. In that context, Harris mentioned US ICE’s perform ought to be re-examined and that “we have to in all probability even take into consideration ranging from scratch.” However Harris didn’t say there shouldn’t be immigration enforcement. In 2018, Harris additionally mentioned ICE had a task and will exist.

Economic system

Trump mentioned Harris “solid the deciding vote that launched the worst inflation within the historical past of our nation. She price the everyday American household over $3,000 in a brief interval, however over $30,000 during the last three years”.

Largely False. Harris solid the tie-breaking vote on the movement to proceed to a remaining Senate vote on the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act, a coronavirus pandemic aid invoice.

An ideologically numerous cross-section of economists agrees that the American Rescue Plan added a few share factors to inflation, however didn’t trigger the broader spike. The first causes, they are saying, have been provide chain disruptions from the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Yr-over-year inflation peaked in 2022 at about 9 %. That made it the worst annual fee in 40 years, however not the worst in US historical past.

The $28,000 improve is a reputable estimate of the additional quantity that households have paid for purchases since Biden took workplace. However that determine ignores that wage features have evened out a lot – or relying on the timeframe, all – of these elevated prices.

LGBTQ+ points

Trump mentioned Harris “referred to as at no cost intercourse change operations on unlawful aliens in detention at taxpayer expense”.

The assertion wants clarification, so we rated it Largely True.

Harris’s historical past on this matter goes again to when she was California’s legal professional normal and represented the state’s corrections division because it sought to dam a decrease courtroom order requiring the company to offer gender-affirming surgical procedure to a transgender inmate.

Throughout her run for president within the 2019 Democratic main, Harris mentioned she favoured entry to gender-affirming surgical procedure for individuals in prisons and immigration detention. Harris has not campaigned on this difficulty in 2024, however when requested about it throughout a Fox Information interview on October 16, she mentioned: “I’ll comply with the regulation.”

Federal regulation requires that prisons present vital medical care to inmates, and a number of other courts have dominated that gender-affirming care, together with surgical procedure, is included. Regardless of these courtroom rulings, entry to gender-affirming surgical procedure in prisons is proscribed, and the variety of transgender prisoners in federal prisons who’ve obtained it’s minuscule – two.

We discovered no document of gender-affirming surgical procedures being supplied in immigration detention.

Crime and weapons

Trump mentioned Harris “pledged to confiscate your weapons” and “endorsed a complete ban on handgun possession”.

This distorts Harris’s present stance.

As a 2019 presidential main candidate, Harris mentioned: “I help a compulsory gun buyback programme” for assault weapons. She now not helps this coverage, which might not have utilized to handguns, the preferred firearms.

The Harris marketing campaign advised The New York Instances that she helps banning assault weapons however not a requirement to promote them to the federal authorities. As vice chairman, Harris has urged states to cross purple flag legal guidelines and supported federal gun security laws that included funding for psychological well being and college safety assets.

There’s proof that she supported a gun ban, however that was restricted to 1 metropolis almost 20 years in the past. In 2005 when Harris was the San Francisco district legal professional, she supported a poll measure that will have banned metropolis residents from proudly owning handguns. Voters authorised the measure, however the courts struck it down.

Trump mentioned: “Your crime is thru the roof” and that newly launched statistics confirmed that “crime was up 45 %” beneath the Biden-Harris administration.

Trump might have meant to say 4.5 %, a determine that has been cited in some media accounts sympathetic to Trump. However even that decrease determine can be deceptive.

This remark was a part of a dialogue by Trump of an change he had with ABC Information’ David Muir throughout the September 10 presidential debate in Philadelphia, by which Muir mentioned crime had declined and Trump insisted that crime had risen.

Usually, FBI annual knowledge has proven a decline in violent crime from 2020 to 2023. A number of nongovernmental crime statistics analyses additionally discovered violent crime declined in 2023 and 2024.

In October, it was reported that the FBI had up to date its violent crime knowledge to be extra full, a normal annual course of. The up to date knowledge led some commentators to say this meant crime had elevated between 2021 and 2022; somewhat than being down by 2.1 %, some mentioned, it was up by 4.5 percnt between these two years, with 1000’s of recent violent crimes.

Nonetheless, crime consultants together with Jeff Asher of JH Analytics mentioned it is a statistical artefact.

That’s as a result of the baseline for this comparability is the info for 2021, which Asher and different crime consultants say is unreliable as a result of the FBI switched crime reporting programs that 12 months and compliance by native police departments plummeted. (The issue has been mounted within the annual knowledge for later years.)

Asher described the revisions launched in October as unusually giant, and for unclear causes. However he wrote that “the FBI’s 2023 estimates present a continued small decline in violent crime with a traditionally giant decline in homicide.”