Fact check: Trump repeats numerous false claims at Madison Square Garden rally

Former President Donald Trump repeated a series of long-debunked false claims about immigration and other subjects early in his speech at a Sunday evening rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City.

Former President Donald Trump repeated a series of long-debunked false claims about immigration and other subjects early in his speech at a Sunday evening rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City. FEMA and migrants: Trump falsely claimed that the Biden administration has not responded to Hurricane Helene in North Carolina, then repeated his familiar false explanation: “You know why? 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.