Fact check: Debunking 16 false claims Trump made at Madison Square Garden

By Daniel Dale, CNN

Washington (CNN) — Former President Donald Trump repeated a series of false claims, many of which have long been debunked, about immigration and other subjects in his speech at a Sunday evening rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City.

Here is a fact check of 16 false claims he made in the speech.

FEMA and North Carolina: Trump falsely claimed of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s response to Hurricane Helene: “They haven’t even responded in North Carolina. They haven’t even responded. There’s nobody, they don’t see any FEMA.” This is not even close to true; FEMA immediately responded to the disaster in North Carolina and said Friday that it had more than 1,700 staff deployed in the state. FEMA said on October 16 that it had approved more than $100 million in individual aid to North Carolina residents.

At a briefing in early October, North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, said, “We’re grateful for the quick actions and close communications that we have had with the president and with the FEMA team.” State emergency management director Will Ray said at the briefing: “We’re grateful for the support not just from the 22 states that have sent teams to support us but also from our FEMA team and other members of the federal family.”

FEMA and migrants: Trump falsely claimed that FEMA didn’t respond in North Carolina because “they spent their money on bringing in illegal migrants, so they didn’t have money for Georgia and North Carolina and Alabama and Tennessee and Florida and South Carolina.” He repeated, “They didn’t have any money for them. They spent all of their money on bringing in illegal immigrants.”

FEMA did not spend its disaster relief money on undocumented people.
Congress appropriated the agency more than $35 billion in disaster relief funds for fiscal 2024, according to official FEMA statistics, and also gave FEMA a much smaller pool of money, $650 million in fiscal 2024, for a program aimed at helping communities shelter migrants. Contrary to Trump’s claims, these are two separate pots of funds.

Trump’s favorite immigration chart: Trump repeated his long-debunked false claim that his favorite chart about migration numbers at the southern border — which he had fortunately turned his head to look at when a gunman tried to kill him at a campaign rally in July — has an arrow at the bottom pointing to “the day I left office,” when, he said, the US had “the lowest illegal immigration that we’ve ever had in recorded history.”

The chart doesn’t show that. In fact, the arrow actually points to April 2020, when Trump still had more than eight months left in his term and when global migration had slowed to a trickle because of the Covid-19 pandemic. After hitting a roughly three-year low (not an all-time low) in April 2020, migration numbers at the southern border increased each month through the end of Trump’s term.

Harris’ border role: Trump repeated these false claims about Vice President Kamala Harris: “She was the border czar. She was in charge of the border.” Harris was never “border czar,” a label the White House has always emphasized is inaccurate, and she was never in charge of border security, a responsibility of Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas. In reality, President Joe Biden gave Harris a more limited immigration-related assignment in 2021, asking her to lead diplomacy with El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras in an attempt to address the conditions that prompted their citizens to try to migrate to the United States.

Migrants, cities and towns: Trump repeated his vow that, if elected, he would liberate every “city and town that has been invaded and conquered” by migrants. This is nonsense; no US town has been conquered by migrants.

Migrants in Springfield, Ohio: Trump falsely claimed: “You take a look at Springfield, Ohio, think of this – where, think of this, where 30,000 illegal migrants were put into a town of 50,000 people.”

This is false in more than one way. While we don’t know the immigration status of each and every Haitian immigrant in Springfield, the community is, on the whole, in the country lawfully. The Springfield city website says, “YES, Haitian immigrants are here legally, under the Immigration Parole Program. Once here, immigrants are then eligible to apply for Temporary Protected Status (TPS).” Republican Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine wrote in a New York Times op-ed about Springfield in September that the Haitian immigrants “are there legally” and that, as a Trump-Vance supporter, he is “saddened” by the candidates’ disparagement of “the legal migrants living in Springfield.”

Second, nobody “put” the immigrants into Springfield; the city’s Haitian residents were not sent there by a government resettlement program. Rather, they independently decided to move to the city because of employment opportunities, affordable housing and the presence of a Haitian community, among other factors.

And while there is no official tally of the number of immigrants in Springfield, Trump’s “30,000” figure exceeds local estimates. The website for the city of Springfield says there are an estimated 12,000 to 15,000 immigrants in the county that includes Springfield, where the total population is about 138,000. Chris Cook, the county’s health commissioner, said in July that his team estimated the best number was 10,000 to 12,000 Haitian residents in the county.

“Missing” migrant children: Trump repeated his regular false claim that, because of Harris, “325,000 children are missing, dead, sex slaves or slaves. They came through the open border and they’re gone. Their parents will most likely never see them again, almost any of them.”

Trump was wildly distorting federal statistics.

He appeared to be referring to an August report from the Homeland Security Department’s Office of Inspector General, which said ICE reported more than 32,000 unaccompanied migrant children failed to appear as scheduled for immigration court hearings after being released or transferred out of custody between fiscal years 2019 and 2023 – a period that, notably, includes two years and four months under the Trump administration. The report also said that 291,000 unaccompanied migrant children during this period were not given notices to appear in court.

The report said that ICE has “no assurances” these children “are safe from trafficking, exploitation, or forced labor.” But it did not definitively assert that any of them were being exploited – let alone that almost all of them have vanished for good.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, told CNN in a message this summer: “Long story short, no, there are not 320,000 kids missing. 32,000 kids missed court. That doesn’t mean they’re missing, it means they missed court (either because their sponsor didn’t bring them or they are teenagers who didn’t want to show up). The remaining 291,000 cases mentioned by the OIG are cases where ICE hasn’t filed the paperwork to start their immigration court cases.”

Trump’s rally crowd in Butler, Pennsylvania: Trump repeated his wild exaggeration that there were “101,000 people” at the campaign rally he held earlier this month at the same Pennsylvania site where a gunman tried to kill him in July. CNN affiliate KDKA in Pittsburgh reported that the Secret Service put the crowd at 24,000 people, while the Trump-supporting sheriff of Blair County, Pennsylvania, James Ott, said in his speech at the rally itself (more than three hours before Trump took the stage) that he was looking out at “21,000-plus people.”

Trump and the Nord Stream 2 pipeline: Trump repeated his false claim that he “ended” the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany, adding, “It was dead.” Trump did not kill the pipeline. He signed sanctions related to the project into law about three years into his presidency, when the pipeline was already about 90% complete, and the state-owned Russian company behind the project announced in December 2020 that construction was resuming.

Trump and the defeat of ISIS: Trump repeated his false claim that “it took us like four weeks” to defeat the ISIS terror group even though generals had told him it would take five years. The ISIS “caliphate” was declared fully liberated more than two years into Trump’s presidency.

Trump and inflation: Trump falsely claimed that, when he was president, “we had no inflation.” Cumulative inflation during Trump’s presidency was about 8%.

Harris and inflation: Trump falsely claimed that Harris’ votes to break legislative ties in the US Senate “caused the worst inflation in the history of our country.” Aside from the claim about Harris’ role, it’s not true the US has had its worst inflation ever during the Biden administration; Trump could fairly say that the US inflation rate hit a 40-year high in June 2022, when it was 9.1%, but that was not close to the all-time record of 23.7%, set in 1920. (And the rate has since plummeted. The most recent available inflation rate at the time Trump spoke here was 2.4% in September.)

Harris and law enforcement: Trump touted his endorsements from police officers and law enforcement organizations, then falsely said of Harris: “I don’t think they have one cop. They’re looking for just one cop.” In early September, 101 current and former law enforcement officials, including active sheriffs, police chiefs and other senior officers, released a letter endorsing Harris. A Michigan sheriff gave a televised speech endorsing Harris at the Democratic National Convention in August, as did a former Capitol Police officer who was injured when Trump supporters stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Trump’s border wall: The former president repeated his false claim that he “built 571 miles of wall” on the southern border. That’s a significant exaggeration; official government data shows 458 miles were built under Trump — including both wall built where no barriers had existed before and wall built to replace previous barriers.

Trump and the military: The former president repeated his false claim that “I rebuilt our military, in total — rebuilt all of our military.”

Trump has previously made clear that he is claiming to have replaced all of the military’s equipment. “This claim is not even close to being true. The military has tens of thousands of pieces of equipment, and the vast majority of it predates the Trump administration,” Todd Harrison, an expert on the defense budget and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, told CNN in November 2023, after Trump made a version of the claim.

Harrison said in an email at the time: “Moreover, the process of acquiring new equipment for the military is slow and takes many years. It’s not remotely possible to replace even half of the military’s inventory of equipment in one presidential term. I just ran the numbers for military aircraft, and about 88% of the aircraft in the U.S. military inventory today (including Air Force, Army, Navy, and Marine Corps aircraft) were built before Trump took office. In terms of fighters in particular, we still have F-16s and F- 15s in the Air Force that are over 40 years old.”

The 2020 election: Trump repeated his false claim that his opponents “used Covid to cheat” in the 2020 election. There is no basis for the claim that the Democrats cheated; many states, including states with Republican election chiefs and Republican governors, modified their election procedures because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

This story has been updated with additional information.

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