Former President Donald Trump hammered dwelling 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 known as Puerto Rico an “island of garbage” and disparaged Black Individuals, Latinos and Jewish folks. Democrats and at the least two Florida Republicans, together with Senator Rick Scott, swiftly 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 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 reduction as a result of the federal government spent its cash bringing immigrants into the nation illegally (it didn’t) and that international nations had been emptying their prisons and sending convicts to the US (they don’t seem to be).
A gaggle of audio system preceded Trump, together with Trump’s working 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 first 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 Occasion he leads “has really become the party of inclusion, and there’s something very nice about that”.
Trump’s selection 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 continuously has criticised, together with District Lawyer Alvin Bragg who obtained a 34-count felony conviction towards Trump for falsifying enterprise information.
Listed here are eight claims we fact-checked, main with 4 about immigration.
Immigration
Trump mentioned Harris “has imported criminal migrants from prisons and jails, insane asylums and mental institutions from all around the world, from Venezuela to the Congo”.
Pants on Fireplace! There isn’t a proof that nations are emptying their prisons – or psychological establishments – and sending folks to illegally migrate to the US.
Immigration officers arrested about 108,000 non-citizens with legal convictions (whether or not within the US or overseas) from fiscal years 2021 to 2024, federal information exhibits. That accounts for folks stopped at and between ports of entry. Not everybody was let in.
Trump mentioned: “I will invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.”
Authorized specialists instructed PolitiFact that Trump doesn’t have the authority to make use of the legislation to hold out mass deportations and that invoking it might 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 struggle with the US.
The legislation has been used solely 3 times in US historical past, all throughout wartime. The final time the act was invoked was throughout World Conflict II, and it was used to position non-citizens from Japan, Germany and Italy in internment camps.
Trump mentioned: “Think of this: 325,000 children are missing, dead, sex slaves, or slaves. They came through the open border and they’re gone.”
This can be a distortion of federal information 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 “Notice to Appear” to greater than 291,000 unaccompanied minors, as of Might. (A discover to look is a charging doc authorities problem and file in immigration court docket to start out elimination proceedings.)
The report mentioned unaccompanied youngsters “who do not appear for court are considered at higher risk for trafficking, exploitation, or forced labour”. The report doesn’t state what number of youngsters have really been trafficked.
The report led Republican legislators and conservative information shops to say that ICE “lost” the kids or that they’re “missing”. 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 operate needs to be re-examined and that “we need to probably even think about starting from scratch.” However Harris didn’t say there shouldn’t be immigration enforcement. In 2018, Harris additionally mentioned ICE had a job and will exist.
Economic system
Trump mentioned Harris “cast the deciding vote that launched the worst inflation in the history of our country. She cost the typical American family over $3,000 in a short period, but over $30,000 over the last three years”.
Largely False. Harris solid the tie-breaking vote on the movement to proceed to a ultimate Senate vote on the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act, a coronavirus pandemic reduction invoice.
An ideologically numerous cross-section of economists agrees that the American Rescue Plan added a few proportion factors to inflation, however didn’t trigger the broader spike. The first causes, they are saying, had been provide chain disruptions from the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
12 months-over-year inflation peaked in 2022 at about 9 %. That made it the worst annual charge in 40 years, however not the worst in US historical past.
The $28,000 enhance is a reputable estimate of the additional quantity that households have paid for purchases since Biden took workplace. However that determine ignores that wage good points have evened out a lot – or relying on the timeframe, all – of these elevated prices.
LGBTQ+ points
Trump mentioned Harris “called for free sex change operations on illegal 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 lawyer common and represented the state’s corrections division because it sought to dam a decrease court docket 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 folks in prisons and immigration detention. Harris has not campaigned on this problem in 2024, however when requested about it throughout a Fox Information interview on October 16, she mentioned: “I will follow the law.”
Federal legislation requires that prisons present essential medical care to inmates, and several other courts have dominated that gender-affirming care, together with surgical procedure, is included. Regardless of these court docket rulings, entry to gender-affirming surgical procedure in prisons is restricted, and the variety of transgender prisoners in federal prisons who’ve acquired it’s minuscule – two.
We discovered no report of gender-affirming surgical procedures being supplied in immigration detention.
Crime and weapons
Trump mentioned Harris “pledged to confiscate your guns” and “endorsed a total ban on handgun ownership”.
This distorts Harris’s present stance.
As a 2019 presidential main candidate, Harris mentioned: “I support a mandatory gun buyback programme” for assault weapons. She not helps this coverage, which might not have utilized to handguns, the most well-liked firearms.
The Harris marketing campaign instructed The New York Occasions that she helps banning assault weapons however not a requirement to promote them to the federal authorities. As vp, Harris has urged states to move pink flag legal guidelines and supported federal gun security laws that included funding for psychological well being and college safety assets.
There may be 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 lawyer, she supported a poll measure that will have banned metropolis residents from proudly owning handguns. Voters accredited the measure, however the courts struck it down.
Trump mentioned: “Your crime is through the roof” and that newly launched statistics confirmed that “crime was up 45 percent” 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 could be deceptive.
This remark was a part of a dialogue by Trump of an alternate he had with ABC Information’ David Muir in the course of the September 10 presidential debate in Philadelphia, through which Muir mentioned crime had declined and Trump insisted that crime had risen.
Normally, FBI annual information 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 information to be extra full, a normal annual course of. The up to date information 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 latest violent crimes.
Nonetheless, crime specialists together with Jeff Asher of JH Analytics mentioned this can be a statistical artefact.
That’s as a result of the baseline for this comparability is the info for 2021, which Asher and different crime specialists say is unreliable as a result of the FBI switched crime reporting techniques that yr and compliance by native police departments plummeted. (The issue has been mounted within the annual information for later years.)
Asher described the revisions launched in October as unusually massive, and for unclear causes. However he wrote that “the FBI’s 2023 estimates show a continued small decline in violent crime with a historically large decline in murder.”
