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

But before Trump spoke, the event made headlines for a series of racist jokes from comedian Tony Hinchcliffe. He called Puerto Rico a “garbage island” and despised black Americans, Latinos, and Jews. Democrats and at least two Florida Republicans, including Sen. Rick Scott, quickly 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 candidate, said he was presiding over the most secure border in US history (he didn’t), that the Federal Emergency Management Agency did not provide hurricane relief because the government spent its money bringing immigrants into the country illegally (he didn’t) and that foreign nations were emptying their prisons and sending convicts to the US (they are not).

A host of speakers preceded Trump, including Trump running mate Sen. JD Vance, 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 spoke of Harris’ potential victory, which marks “the first Samoan, Malaysian and low-IQ ex-California attorney to ever 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.

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

Trump’s choice of New York City as the venue for the rally may have challenged political logic; New York as a state has voted for the Democratic presidential candidate for decades, although Madison Square Garden has hosted major political events for more than a century. The appearance in New York put Trump in the backyard of officials he has frequently criticized, including District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who obtained a 34-count conviction against Trump for falsifying business records.

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

Immigration

Trump said Harris “imported criminal migrants from jails and prisons, insane asylums and mental institutions all over the world, from Venezuela to the Congo.”

Pants on fire! Exist no evidence that countries are emptying their prisons – or mental institutions – and sending people to immigrate illegally to the US.

Immigration officials arrested about 108,000 non-citizens with criminal convictions (either in the U.S. or abroad) from fiscal years 2021 through 2024, federal data show. This accounts for people stopped at and between ports of entry. Not everyone was allowed 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 allows a president to quickly deport non-citizens without due process if they are 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 the act was invoked was during World War II, and it was used to place noncitizens in Japan, Germany, and Italy in internment camps.

Trump said: “Think about this: 325,000 children are missing, dead, sex slaves or slaves. They went through the open border and left.”

This is one deformation of federal data on migrant children.

An August federal watchdog report on unaccompanied minors released from federal custody said Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had not provided a “notice of presentment” to more than 291,000 unaccompanied minors as of May. (A Notice to Present is a charging document issued and filed with immigration court to begin removal proceedings.)

The report says unaccompanied children “who do not appear in court are considered to be at greater risk of trafficking, exploitation or forced labour”. The report does not say how many children were actually trafficked.

The report prompted Republican lawmakers and conservative news outlets to say that ICE had “lost” the children or that they were “missing.” But that’s not what he said.

Trump said Harris “promised to dismantle” US Immigration and Customs Enforcement

False.

As a US senator in 2018, Kamala Harris criticized the Trump administration’s immigration policies, including a policy that resulted in families being separated at the border. In this context, Harris said that the US ICE function should be re-examined and that “we probably really need to think about starting from scratch”. But Harris didn’t say there shouldn’t be immigration enforcement. In 2018, Harris also said that ICE had a role and should have one.

Economy

Trump said Harris “cast the deciding vote that launched the worst inflation in the history of our country. It has cost the typical American family more than $3,000 in a short period, but more than $30,000 in the past three years.”

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

An ideologically diverse cross-section of economists agrees that the Bailout added a few percentage points to inflation but did not cause broader growth. The main causes, they say, were supply chain disruptions due to the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Year-over-year inflation peaked in 2022 at around 9%. 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 additional amount households have paid for purchases since Biden took office. But that figure ignores the fact that wage gains offset many — or, depending on the time frame, all — of those increased costs.

LGBTQ+ issues

Trump said Harris “demanded free sex reassignment surgeries for illegal aliens in detention at taxpayer expense.”

The statement needs clarification, so I’ve evaluated it Mostly true.

Harris’ history on the issue dates back to when he was California’s attorney general representing the state’s Department of Corrections as he tried to block a lower court ruling requiring the agency to provide gender-affirmation surgery to a transgender inmate.

During his run for president in the 2019 Democratic primary, Harris said he favored access to gender-affirming surgery for people in prisons and immigration detention. Harris has not campaigned on the issue in 2024, but when asked about it during an Oct. 16 Fox News interview, she said, “I’m going to follow the law.”

Federal law requires prisons to provide necessary medical care to inmates, and several courts have ruled that includes sex-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 received it is a tiny two.

We found no record of sex-affirmation surgeries performed in immigration detention.

Crime and weapons

Trump said Harris was “committed to confiscating your guns” and “endorsed a total handgun ban.”

This it distorts Harris’ current position.

Like a 2019 presidential candidate, Harris said: “I support a mandatory gun buyback program” for assault weapons. She no longer supports that policy, which would not have applied to handguns, the most popular firearms.

The Harris campaign told The New York Times that it supports a ban on assault weapons, but not a requirement to sell them to the federal government. As vice president, Harris 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 it was limited to one city nearly 20 years ago. In 2005, when Harris was San Francisco’s district attorney, he 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 recently released statistics showed that “crime is up 45 percent” under the Biden-Harris administration.

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

That comment was part of Trump’s discussion of an exchange he had with ABC News’ David Muir during the Sept. 10 presidential debate in Philadelphia, in which Muir said crime was down and Trump insisted that crime has increased.

Overall, the FBI’s annual data showed a decline in violent crime from 2020 to 2023. Multiple analyzes of non-governmental crime statistics also found that 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 that this meant crime increased between 2021 and 2022; instead of falling 2.1 percent, some said, it rose 4.5 percent between the two years, with thousands of new violent crimes.

However, crime experts, including Jeff Asher of JH Analytics, said this was a statistical artifact.

That’s because the baseline for this comparison is data for 2021, which Asher and other crime experts say is UNSAFE because the FBI changed crime reporting systems that year, and compliance by local police departments declined. (The problem has been fixed in the annual data for subsequent years.)

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