Trump rallied his MAGA troops with angry words about immigration and mocked Kamala Harris. We fact check the claims he made.
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.
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.
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.
This is a distortion of federal data about migrant children.
Immigration
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.
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.
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.
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.
This distorts Harris’s current stance.
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