Former President Donald Trump hammered house 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 rubbish” and disparaged Black Individuals, Latinos and Jewish individuals. Democrats and at the least two Florida Republicans, together with Senator Rick Scott, swiftly condemned Hinchcliffe’s remarks about Puerto Rico.
“This joke doesn’t replicate the views of President Trump or the marketing campaign,” Danielle Alvarez, a senior adviser to the Trump marketing campaign mentioned in a press release 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 overseas nations have 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 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 Combating 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 girl of multicultural descent; her mom was born in India and her father was born in Jamaica.
Trump nonetheless mentioned the Republican Social gathering he leads “has actually grow to be the get together of inclusion, and there’s one thing very good about that”.
Trump’s selection of New York Metropolis as a rally web site 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 often has criticised, together with District Legal professional Alvin Bragg who obtained a 34-count felony conviction in opposition to Trump for falsifying enterprise information.
Listed below 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 around the globe, from Venezuela to the Congo”.
Pants on Hearth! There’s no proof that international locations 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 reveals. 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 informed PolitiFact that Trump doesn’t have the authority to make use of the legislation 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 conflict with the US.
The legislation 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 position non-citizens from Japan, Germany and Italy in internment camps.
Trump mentioned: “Consider this: 325,000 kids are lacking, lifeless, intercourse slaves, or slaves. They got here by means of the open border and so they’re gone.”
It is a distortion of federal knowledge about migrant kids.
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 seem is a charging doc authorities challenge and file in immigration courtroom to start out removing proceedings.)
The report mentioned unaccompanied kids “who don’t seem for courtroom are thought-about at larger danger for trafficking, exploitation, or compelled labour”. The report doesn’t state what number of kids have truly been trafficked.
The report led Republican legislators and conservative information shops to say that ICE “misplaced” the youngsters or that they’re “lacking”. However that’s not what it mentioned.
Trump mentioned Harris “vowed to abolish” US Immigration and Customs Enforcement
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 job and will exist.
Financial system
Trump mentioned Harris “forged the deciding vote that launched the worst inflation within the historical past of our nation. She value the everyday American household over $3,000 in a brief interval, however over $30,000 over the past three years”.
Largely False. Harris forged the tie-breaking vote on the movement to proceed to a last Senate vote on the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act, a coronavirus pandemic reduction invoice.
An ideologically various 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.
12 months-over-year inflation peaked in 2022 at about 9 p.c. That made it the worst annual price 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 positive factors have evened out a lot – or relying on the timeframe, all – of these elevated prices.
LGBTQ+ points
Trump mentioned Harris “known as free of charge 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 subject goes again to when she was California’s lawyer common and represented the state’s corrections division because it sought to dam a decrease courtroom order requiring the company to supply 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 challenge in 2024, however when requested about it throughout a Fox Information interview on October 16, she mentioned: “I’ll comply with the legislation.”
Federal legislation requires that prisons present needed medical care to inmates, and several 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 report 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 not helps this coverage, which might not have utilized to handguns, the preferred firearms.
The Harris marketing campaign informed The New York Occasions 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 go pink flag legal guidelines and supported federal gun security laws that included funding for psychological well being and faculty safety sources.
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 lawyer, she supported a poll measure that may have banned metropolis residents from proudly owning handguns. Voters accepted 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 p.c” underneath the Biden-Harris administration.
Trump might have meant to say 4.5 p.c, 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 through the September 10 presidential debate in Philadelphia, by which Muir mentioned crime had declined and Trump insisted that crime had risen.
Basically, 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 p.c, some mentioned, it was up by 4.5 percnt between these two years, with hundreds 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.”
