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

LOOK: Trump’s rally in Madison Square Garden highlights crude and racist slurs

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 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 that addressed the comedian’s comment about Puerto Rico.

At the meeting, Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, said he presided over the most secure border in American history (he didn’t), that the Federal Emergency Management Agency was not delivering hurricane relief because the government was spending its money bringing immigrants into the country. the country illegally (it didn’t) and that foreign nations were emptying their prisons and sending prisoners to the US (they weren’t).

A bevy of speakers preceded Trump, including Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, Trump’s sons Eric and Don Jr., Trump’s wife, Melania, his daughter-in-law and Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump, U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La ., Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White, professional wrestler Hulk Hogan, entrepreneur Elon Musk and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

Carlson riffed on Harris’ potential victory marking “the first Samoan, Malaysian, low-IQ ex-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.

Still, Trump 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 the rally site may have defied 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. Appearing in New York also put Trump in the backyard of officials he has often criticized, including District Attorney Alvin Bragg who received a 34’s conviction against Trump for falsifying business records.

Here are eight claims we fact-checked.

Immigration

Trump said Harris “has imported criminal migrants from jails and prisons, insane asylums and mental hospitals from all over 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 noncitizens with criminal convictions (whether in the U.S. or abroad) from fiscal years 2021 to 2024, federal data show. It stands for people who stayed at and between ports of entry. Not everyone was admitted.

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 come from a country at war with the United States

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 non-citizens from Japan, Germany, and Italy in internment camps.

Trump said: “Consider 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 on immigrant children.

A federal oversight report in August on unaccompanied minors released from federal custody said Immigration and Customs Enforcement had not sent a “notice to appear” to more than 291,000 unaccompanied minors as of May. (A Notice to Appear is a charging document that the authorities issue and file with the immigration court to initiate removal proceedings.)

LOOK: Harris is wooing voters from across the aisle as Trump stokes fears of crime and immigration

The report says unaccompanied children “who do not come to court are considered to be at higher risk of trafficking, exploitation or forced labor.” The report does not indicate how many children have actually been trafficked.

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

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

Fake.

As a US senator in 2018, Kamala Harris criticized the Trump administration’s immigration policies, including one that led to family separations at the border. In that context, Harris said that the operation of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement should be re-examined and that “we probably have to think about starting from scratch.” But Harris didn’t say there shouldn’t be immigration enforcement. In 2018, Harris also said that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement had a role and should exist.

Economy

Trump said Harris “cast the decisive vote that started the worst inflation in our country’s history. She cost the typical American family over $3,000 in a short period, but over $30,000 in the last three years.”

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

An ideologically diverse cross-section of economists agree that the US bailout added a couple of percentage points to inflation, but did not cause the broader peak. The main reasons, they say, were supply chain disruptions from the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

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

The $28,000 increase is a credible estimate of how much extra households have paid for purchases since Biden took office. But that figure ignores that wage increases have offset much — or depending on the time frame, all — of those increased costs.

READ MORE: US inflation drops to three-year low of 2.4 percent, some price pressure remains

LGBTQ+ issues

Trump said Harris “demanded free sex-change surgeries on illegal aliens in prison at taxpayer expense.”

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

Harris’ history on this topic dates back to when she was California’s attorney general, representing the state’s Department of Corrections when it tried to block a lower court order requiring the agency to provide gender-affirming surgeries to a transgender person.

During her run for president in the 2019 Democratic primary, Harris said she advocated 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 will follow the law.”

Federal law requires prisons to provide necessary medical care to inmates, and several courts have ruled that gender-affirming care, including surgery, is included. Despite these court orders, access to gender-affirming surgery in prisons is limited, and the number of trans inmates in federal prisons who have received it is very small—two.

We found no records of gender-affirming surgeries performed in immigration detention.

Crime and weapons

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

This distorts Harris’ current stance.

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

READ MORE: DNC Office Shooting Suspect Had More Than 120 Guns in Arizona Home, Officials Find

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 safety resources.

There is evidence that she supported a gun ban, but it was limited to one city almost 20 years ago. In 2005 when Harris was district attorney in San Francisco, 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 recently released statistics showed that “crime is 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 Trump-sympathetic media accounts. But even the lower figure would be misleading.

The comment was part of a discussion by Trump about an exchange he had with ABC News’ David Muir during the Sept. 10 presidential debate in Philadelphia, in which Muir said crime had dropped and Trump insisted that crime had increased.

Overall, annual data from the FBI has shown a decrease in violent crime from 2020 to 2023. Several non-governmental crime statistics analyzes also found that violent crime decreased 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 prompted some commentators to say that this meant that crime had increased between 2021 and 2022; rather than falling 2.1 percent, some said, it was up 4.5 percent between those two years, with thousands of new violent crimes.

But crime experts including Jeff Asher of JH Analytics said this is a statistical artifact.

That’s because the baseline for this comparison is 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 annual data for later 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 large decline in homicides.”