Remarks by President Trump in Cabinet Meeting | Eastern North Carolina Now

    So, sir, the bottom line, as you know and as you've repeatedly stated: We need Congress to fund and build the wall, give us the resources to deal with this crisis, terminate the Flores Agreement, and grant DHS the authority to detain and remove illegal family unit aliens together, and modify the TVPRA so unaccompanied children can be returned home to their families.

    Right now, our Border Patrol and ICE agents are spending so much of their time dealing with the overflow that we're having to pull them off important national security cases, counter-drug operations, and more. We can't afford to do this any longer.

    I want to close by thanking the whole of your administration, the Department of Defense, Department of Justice, HHS, CDC, OMB, and others. We are all working together to address this security and humanitarian crisis.

    Mr. President, you have brought the rule of law back to our border. The men and women of DHS could not be prouder to be given the opportunity to do the jobs that Congress and the American people expect. But we need Congress to act. We cannot continue to do more with less and attempt to secure our country with our hands tied behind our back.

    Thank you for your leadership and your continued focus as we work with Congress to try to address this.


    THE PRESIDENT: Thank you very much. That's a really fantastic presentation, and I appreciate it. And you have been working very hard. You've been down there. Every time I call, you're at a different location along the border trying to straighten it out.

    If we had a wall or a barrier that was not penetrable, you wouldn't have people making that journey. And I think we can say that, Kirstjen, if we had the wall, people wouldn't even bother making the journey, because the journey is tremendously dangerous - horribly dangerous. And children are getting sick. They're being accosted.

    You heard what the Secretary said about all of the crime and rape and everything else that takes place during that horrible journey. If they thought they couldn't get in, they wouldn't be making the journey.

    And again, we want people coming into our country. We need people to come into our country, but they have to do it through the system. They have to go - they have to do it legally. And we want people coming that can help our country; that can - where it can be based on merit and achievements; people that are going to help the companies that are coming into our country, which are so many.

    So I want to thank you, Secretary. It was a great presentation. Thank you very much. We really appreciate it.

    Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker? Please.

    ACTING ATTORNEY GENERAL WHITAKER: Sir, Mr. President, I will start by highlighting the fact that you stayed in Washington, D.C. over the holidays, giving up Christmas with your family, New Year's with your family, trying to bring an end to this shutdown, and security to our southern border, while members of Congress - some members of Congress went on vacation and ignored the problem.

    You have demonstrated your dedication to delivering on this critical issue for our country and for the American people. But Congress has to act. They have to fund the wall. It is undeniable that a border wall improves the security of our southern border. A wall would reduce the flow of drugs, gangs like the violent MS-13, and criminals across our border, like you highlighted the brave officer who was a legal immigrant, who was murdered by an illegal immigrant in California.

    It would reduce the incentives for individuals who attempt to enter illegally, and restore integrity to our immigration system. Also, we need Congress, as Secretary Nielsen pointed out, to close the loopholes in our immigration laws. Not only do the loopholes in our laws frustrate DHS's ability to enforce our immigration laws, including the TVPRA and the judicial rulings that prevent DHS from detaining family units together, but these loopholes overwhelmingly contribute to a substantial number of meritless cases languishing in our immigration courts.

    During the shutdown, and afterwards, the Department of Justice will continue to do everything within our power to support both DHS in its critical mission and address illegality at the border. Illegality will not go unchecked. We will continue to prosecute aliens for committing immigration-related crimes, like illegal reentry and illegal entry, which are at record levels for prosecution currently in your administration. And we will never let up.

    We will continue these efforts targeting transnational organized crime and criminal gangs, like MS-13. The immigration courts are working. We have been completing cases at levels we haven't seen in years. We have over 400 immigration judges on board, and we are hiring more. And we are restoring the rule of law to our immigration court system.

    We will continue to do everything we can, and we are seeing tremendous progress. But the number of cases originating from the border are overwhelming the system. We will continue to defend our actions and your administration's actions in federal court, as well.

    This administration has taken strong action to restore legality to our immigration system. But advocates continue to try to frustrate us in federal courts. We will prevail.

    And finally - and I cannot stress this more - that we need Congress to act, to show up, to negotiate with you, and to solve these challenges that our country faces. The Department of Justice will work every day to support this administration, to support DHS, and to support HHS. But we need Congress to do something instead of just going on vacation and avoiding the issue.

    We need Congress to fund the wall, fund the government, and close the loopholes in our laws. If Congress wants to have catch-and-release at the border, and more drugs, gangs, and crime to come into our country, it can continue to refuse to provide the funds that we need to build the wall, and it can continue to refuse to close the loopholes in our immigration laws. That is the choice here, sir.

    THE PRESIDENT: That's great, Matt. Thank you very much. So true. And you mentioned one thing about courts - and I know you're hiring judges - but we're one of the only countries that anybody knows of where if you step one foot into our country, you now have a court case. Other countries, you step a foot, and they say "get out." They put you out - or worse. With our country, if you're able to put a foot onto our land, basically that's what catch-and-release is, even beyond that. But now you end up with lawyers and judges and things. It's so ridiculous.


    This is the system that we have. And nobody pointed it out until we came along. So you end up in a court case to tell somebody - normally, it's like, "Hey, you're on our land. We don't want you. And you have to come through legally. Get out."

    No, we catch, we do paperwork. We bring them to court. You can never have enough judges because you're talking about thousands - tens of thousands of people. You end up in trials, but the trials don't take place, because what they have to do - because it's impossible to hold all of it. This is by law. This is by these idiotic laws given to us by - largely by the Democrats, mostly by the Democrats, that we can change in one hour, if people got together.

    So we end up with court cases for people that just happened to step a foot on our land. You can't take care of them. You're talking tens of thousands. I think we have close to 800,000 pending lawsuits. And what happens - these people disappear into the United States, never to show up for their case, which ends up coming back in about three, four years, five years, and even longer. It is the most ridiculous system.

    We should be able to say, "Sorry, you can't come in. You have to come in legally." End. That's your court case. What we have done with asylum and all of this - we're trying to be the nicest people on Earth, and it's destroying our country. And I think, honestly, if I didn't come along, nobody would even be talking about it, and it would be just as bad. But our country gets eaten alive by what's happening at our southern border. So we've got to do something about it, and we're doing it now. That's what we're doing.

    And one of the things we can do is the wall, because we won't have problems. It will take care of a large number of the problems. Even the changing of some of the laws won't be nearly as important, because a lot of people won't come up because they know they can't get through. And if they do come up, they can't get through.

    One of the other things I'd like to mention is I had a very successful meeting, about a month ago, with President Xi in Argentina. The President of China. And he and I had a meeting that was going to be 45 minutes; it lasted close to four hours. It was very successful.

    One of the things I asked him to do was fentanyl, if you would criminalize it, because it's not criminal. And China has very strong criminal penalties. It's called the death penalty. If you would criminalize fentanyl, it would really help us, because we're losing 80,000 people a year with fentanyl. Eighty thousand. Think of what 80,000 people. That's like a football stadium full of people a year, from taking this horrible drug, most of which comes out of China.

    And he's agreed to criminalize it. That was a big statement. He agreed immediately. And, by the way, it wasn't a long negotiation. It was really a negotiation on trade, which is coming along very well. We'll see what happens. But before I started with trade, I talked about fentanyl. And he agreed to criminalize it and criminalize it at the highest level, which means, I assume, death penalty. So that's going to be put into effect fairly soon, and that should have an amazing impact on the fentanyl coming into our country, which is, right now, just about the worst thing we have coming in. It's nothing worse. It's just - that stuff is really brutal and really terrible. So I want to thank President Xi of China.

    Rick Perry is here, and he was a great governor of Texas for a long time. Knows probably more about the border than anybody. This is a little unexpected, but I see you here, Rick. I'd like to have your feelings on the barriers that we have to put up. I know you feel very strongly about it, and you know the area very well.

    SECRETARY PERRY: I think, Mr. President, your focus on this is really important. While I was the governor, I tried with very poor results to get the previous administration to recognize the lack of support that the state of Texas was getting. And we ran numerous operations along the border.

    Mr. Vice President, you as the governor, we talked about it at Governor Association meetings, about the challenge that we had with that 1,200-mile border. Two-thirds of the border is, of course, with Texas and Mexico, and the United States and Mexico.

    But the challenge has always been the lack of support from Washington, D.C. To have a chief executive finally recognize that it's going to take Washington acting to address this issue is really heartening, from my perspective, having basically been ignored for those eight years, as I was the governor in the previous administration.

    But it's this message that comes that - from the media, from those that, for whatever reason, don't want to secure that border - that you can come and be rewarded. That's got to stop. And one of the ways to do that is obviously with a clear message to those that are trying to use that border as access into the United States is there's not a reward anymore. Don't come.

    When the summertime gets here, the humanitarian issue here, Mr. President, that all too often doesn't get talked about - I mean, the lives that are lost in Mexico, in the desert southwest, in that region of Texas that is incredibly inhospitable, when you're out there trying to cross it. I mean, that's the heart-rending side of this story, Mr. President, that you're trying to address here.

    And, you know, I know here, over the course of the last couple of weeks, there's been some stories about young people who lost their lives. A couple of young people who lost their lives. And our hearts go out for them. But what about the, literally, hundreds of people who have died trying to cross that border because of the incentive that people have given them - all of these different incentives to come and penetrate that border? And you're standing up and saying, "Don't come. Don't put your family in jeopardy."

    You know, I'd personally like to see the media really get focused on those stories, about what you're doing to stop that type of danger and, frankly, hostility to these individuals.


    Building that border security is the most powerful message that we can send. But the most powerful message is from the Chief Executive of the United States standing up and saying, "Congress, you got a responsibility, a duty, to protect and defend the people of this country." I'm sitting here ready to negotiate with you. I'm sitting here ready to find the solution to deal with this horrendous condition that we find in this country.

    All they need to do is come and sit down with you, Mr. President. I know where your heart it. I know where the people around this table's heart is. We're ready to find a solution to this issue of illegal immigration, of drug trafficking, of potential terrorist activity along that southern border. And we've got the expertise. All we need is the will from Congress to come. And we'd be more than happy to partner up with them and find a solution to this.

    THE PRESIDENT: That's really great. Thank you very much. And they'll be here, I guess, at three o' clock. So we'll see what happens. We'll see what comes of it.

    You know, I have to say that it would be a lot easier if I never took up this issue, if I just left it the way it was, where people stream into the country. And we've had tremendous difficulties. If you look at the numbers, you look at the crimes, you look at what we do, what we're doing now - we're taking out thousands and thousands of people that are in, as an example, MS-13, the gang - it's a brutal gang, a vicious gang. They love using knives because they're far more painful than guns. And what they do to people is incredible. And we're moving them out by the thousands. People don't talk about that. We're moving them out by the thousands. They came here over years, and they've taken over towns in Long Island and other places. They're bad people.