Fact-check: Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally in New York City

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

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 garbage” and disparaged Black Americans, Latinos and Jewish people. Democrats and at least two Florida Republicans, including 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 campaign said in a statement after the rally addressing the comedian’s comment about Puerto Rico.

At the rally, Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, said he presided over the most secure border in United States history (he did not), that the Federal Emergency Management Agency did not deliver hurricane relief because the government spent its money bringing immigrants into the country illegally (it did not) and that foreign nations were emptying their prisons and sending convicts to the US (they are not).

A gaggle of speakers preceded Trump, including Trump’s running mate, Senator JD Vance, Trump’s sons Eric and Don Jr, Trump’s wife, Melania, his daughter-in-law and Republican National Committee co-Chair Lara Trump, US House Speaker Mike Johnson, Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White, professional wrestler Hulk Hogan, entrepreneur Elon Musk and former Fox News 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 woman of multicultural descent; her mother was born in India and her father was born in Jamaica.

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

Trump’s choice of New York City as a rally site may have challenged political logic; New York, as a state, has voted for the Democratic candidate for president for decades, though Madison Square Garden has hosted major political events for more than a century. Appearing in New York City also placed Trump in the back yard of officials whom he frequently has criticised, including District Attorney Alvin Bragg who obtained a 34-count felony conviction against Trump for falsifying business records.

Here are eight claims we fact-checked, leading with four about immigration.

Immigration

Trump said 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 Fire! There is no evidence that countries are emptying their prisons – or mental institutions – and sending people to illegally migrate to the US.

Immigration officials arrested about 108,000 non-citizens with criminal convictions (whether in the US or abroad) from fiscal years 2021 to 2024, federal data shows. That accounts for people stopped at and between ports of entry. Not everyone was let 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 it would lead to legal challenges.

The Alien Enemies Act lets a president quickly deport noncitizens without due process if they are from a country at war with the US.

The law has been used only three times in US history, all during wartime. The last time the act was invoked was during World War II, and it was used to place non-citizens from Japan, Germany and Italy in internment camps.

Trump said: “Think of this: 325,000 children are missing, dead, sex slaves, or slaves. They came through the open border and they’re gone.”

This is a distortion of federal data about migrant children.

An August federal oversight report about unaccompanied minors released from federal government custody said Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had not served a “Notice to Appear” to more than 291,000 unaccompanied minors, as of May. (A notice to appear is a charging document authorities issue and file in immigration court to start removal proceedings.)

The report said unaccompanied children “who do not appear for court are considered at higher risk for trafficking, exploitation, or forced labour”. The report does not state how many children have actually been trafficked.

The report led Republican legislators and conservative news outlets to say that ICE “lost” the children or that they are “missing”. But that is not what it said.

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

False.

As a US senator in 2018, Kamala Harris criticised the Trump administration’s immigration policies, including a policy that led to family separations at the border. In that context, Harris said US ICE’s function should be re-examined and that “we need to probably even think about starting from scratch.” But Harris did not say there should not be immigration enforcement. In 2018, Harris also said ICE had a role and should exist.

Economy

Trump said 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”.

Mostly False. Harris cast the tie-breaking vote on the motion to proceed to a final Senate vote on the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act, a coronavirus pandemic relief bill.

An ideologically diverse cross-section of economists agrees that the American Rescue Plan added a couple of percentage points to inflation, but did not cause the wider spike. The primary causes, they say, were supply chain disruptions from the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Year-over-year inflation peaked in 2022 at about 9 percent. That made it the worst annual rate in 40 years, but not the worst in US history.

The $28,000 increase is a credible estimate of the extra amount that households have paid for purchases since Biden took office. But that figure ignores that wage gains have evened out much – or depending on the timeframe, all – of those increased costs.

LGBTQ+ issues

Trump said Harris “called for free sex change operations on illegal aliens in detention at taxpayer expense”.

The statement needs clarification, so we rated it Mostly True.

Harris’s history on this topic goes back to when she was California’s attorney general and represented the state’s corrections department as it sought to block a lower court order requiring the agency to provide gender-affirming surgery to a transgender inmate.

During her run for president in the 2019 Democratic primary, Harris said she favoured access to gender-affirming surgery for people in prisons and immigration detention. Harris has not campaigned on this issue in 2024, but when asked about it during a Fox News interview on October 16, she said: “I will follow the law.”

Federal law requires that prisons provide necessary medical care to inmates, 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 prisoners in federal prisons who have received it is minuscule – two.

We found no record of gender-affirming surgeries being provided in immigration detention.

Crime and guns

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

This distorts Harris’s current stance.

As a 2019 presidential primary candidate, Harris said: “I support a mandatory gun buyback programme” 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 she supports banning assault weapons but not a requirement to sell them to the federal government. As vice president, Harris has urged states to pass red flag laws and supported federal gun safety legislation that included funding for mental health and school security resources.

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

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

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

This comment was part of a discussion by Trump of an exchange he had with ABC News’ David Muir during the September 10 presidential debate in Philadelphia, in which Muir said crime had declined and Trump insisted that crime had risen.

In general, FBI annual data has shown a decline in violent crime from 2020 to 2023. Multiple nongovernmental crime statistics analyses also found violent crime declined 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 led some commentators to say this meant crime had increased between 2021 and 2022; rather than being down by 2.1 percent, some said, it was up by 4.5 percnt between those two years, with thousands of new violent crimes.

However, crime experts including Jeff Asher of JH Analytics said this is a statistical artefact.

That is because the baseline for this comparison is the data for 2021, which Asher and other crime experts say is unreliable because the FBI switched crime reporting systems that year and compliance by local police departments plummeted. (The problem has been fixed in the annual data for later years.)

Asher described the revisions released in October as unusually large, and for unclear reasons. But he wrote that “the FBI’s 2023 estimates show a continued small decline in violent crime with a historically large decline in murder.”

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