Remarks by President Trump on the National Security and Humanitarian Crisis on our Southern Border | Eastern North Carolina Now

    We have some of the greatest people I know. They've been with me from the beginning of my campaign - almost from the first week. The Angel Moms. Unfortunately, we have new Angel Moms. One incredible woman just showed me her daughter who - we're talking about killed, in the year of '18. I said, "I haven't seen you before." She said, "No, I'm new." I said, "That's too bad." It's too bad. It's so sad.

    Stand up, just for a second. Show how beautiful your girl was. Thank you.

    I have such respect for these people. Angel Moms, Angel Dads, Angel Families. I have great respect for these people. These are great people. These are great people. They're fighting for their children that have been killed by people that were illegally in this country.

President Trump in the Rose Garden Declaring a National Emergency. with "Angel Moms" expressing their grief: Above. (White House photo)     Click image to expand.
    And the press doesn't cover them; they don't want to, incredibly. And they're not treated the way they should be. They're fighting for other people because they don't want what happened to their children or husband or anybody.

    We have one young lady whose husband - please, stand up. Your husband was just killed in Maryland. Incredible man. Just killed. Beautiful children - won't be seeing their father again.

    These are brave people. These are people that - they don't have to be here. They don't have to be doing this. They're doing it for other people. So I just want to thank all of you for being here, okay? I really do. I want to thank you. Incredible people.

    Last year, 70,000 Americans were killed, at least - I think the number is ridiculously low - by drugs, including meth and heroin and cocaine, fentanyl. And one of the things that I did with President Xi in China, when I met him in Argentina at a summit - before I even started talking about the trade - it was a trade meeting. It went very well, but before I talked about trade, I talked about something more important.

    I said, "Listen, we have tremendous amounts of fentanyl coming into our country. It kills tens of thousands of people - I think far more than anybody registers. And I'd love you to declare it a lethal drug and put it on your criminal list." And their criminal list is much tougher than our criminal list. Their criminal list - a drug dealer gets a thing called the death penalty. Our criminal list, a drug dealer gets a thing called, "How about a fine?"

    And when I asked President Xi, I said, "Do you have a drug problem?" "No, no, no." I said, "You have 1.4 billion people. What do you mean you have no drug problem?" "No, we don't have a drug problem." I said, "Why?" "Death penalty. We give death penalty to people that sell drugs." End of problem.

    What do we do? We set up blue ribbon committees. Lovely men and women - they sit around a table, they have lunch, they eat, they dine, and they waste a lot of time. So if we want to get smart, we can get smart. You can end the drug problem. You can end it a lot faster than you think.


    But President Xi has agreed to put fentanyl on his list of deadly, deadly drugs. And it's a criminal penalty. And the penalty is death. So that's, frankly, one of the things I'm most excited about in our trade deal, if you want to know the truth. I think maybe there's no more important point.

    We're going to make billions of dollars with this trade deal. It's going to be great for our country and great for China, I hope. Their market is down close to 40 percent. Our market is way up. We've picked up, since my election, trillions of dollars of worth. Trillions. Many trillions. And China has lost trillions of dollars. But I want it to be good for China and I want it to be good for the United States. So we'll see what happens.

    China is coming here next week, by the way. They're coming home, the traders. And then China is coming here next week. And then I'll be meeting with President Xi at some point after that to maybe - for some remaining deals. We'll make them directly, one-on-one, ourselves.

    So, we're going to be signing today, and registering, national emergency. And it's a great thing to do because we have an invasion of drugs, invasion of gangs, invasion of people, and it's unacceptable.

    And by signing the national emergency - something signed many times by other Presidents - many, many times. President Obama - in fact, we may be using one of the national emergencies that he signed, having to do with cartels. Criminal cartels. It's a very good emergency that he signed. And we're going to use parts of it in our dealings on cartels. So that would be a second national emergency. But, in that case, it's already in place.

    And what we want - really want to do - is simple. It's not like it's complicated. It's very simple: We want to stop drugs from coming into our country. We want to stop criminals and gangs from coming into our country. Nobody has done the job that we've ever done. I mean, nobody has done the job that we've done on the border.

    And in a way, what I did by creating such a great economy - and if the opposing party got in, this economy would be down the tubes. You know, I hear a lot of people say, "Oh, well. But maybe the previous administration..." Let me tell you, the previous administration, it was heading south, and it was going fast. We would have been down the tubes. The regulations were strangling our country. Unnecessary regulations.

    By creating such a strong economy - you just look at your televisions or see what's going on today; it's through the roof. What happens is more people want to come, so we have far more people trying to get into our country today than probably we've ever had before. And we've done an incredible job in stopping them, but it's a massive number of people.

    If we had the wall, it would be very easy. We would make up for the cost of the wall just in the cost of the fact that I would be able to have fewer people. We wouldn't need all of this incredible talent, some of whom are sitting in the first row. You wouldn't need all of this incredible talent. We would get - we would get thousands of law enforcement people, including Border Patrol. You put them in different areas, you have them doing different things. Law enforcement and Border Patrol.

    And I want to thank law enforcement, and I want to thank Border Patrol, and I want to thank ICE. ICE is abused by the press and by the Democrats. And, by the way, we're going to be taking care of ICE. You know, we talk about the new bill. We're going to be taking care of ICE. They wanted to get rid of ICE. And the bill is just the opposite of that. A lot of good things happened.

    So, that's the story. We want to have a safe country. I ran on a very simple slogan: "Make America Great Again." If you're going to have drugs pouring across the border, if you're going to have human traffickers pouring across the border in areas where we have no protection, in areas where we don't have a barrier, then very hard to make America great again.

    But we've done a fantastic job, but we haven't been given the equipment. We haven't been given the walls. And in the bill, by the way, they didn't even fight us on most of the stuff. Ports of entry. We have so much money, we don't know what to do with it. I don't know what to do with all the money they're giving us. It's crazy.

    The only place they don't want to give as much money - $1,375,000,000. Sounds like a lot, but it's not so much, although we're putting it to much better use than it used to be. A lot of the past administrations, they had - it was easy to get, and they didn't build or they didn't do what they could have done. It would have been great. It would have been great to have done it earlier, but I was a little new to the job, a little new to the profession.

    And we had a little disappointment for the first year and a half. People that should have stepped up did not step up. They didn't step up, and they should have. Would have been easy. Not that easy, but it would have been a lot easier. But some people didn't step up. But we're stepping up now.


    So we have a chance of getting close to $8 billion. Whether it's $8 billion or $2 billion or $1.5 billion, it's going to build a lot of wall. We're getting it done. We're right now in construction with wall in some of the most important areas. And we have renovated a tremendous amount of wall, making it just as good as new. That's where a lot of the money has been spent - on renovation. In fact, we were restricted to renovating, which is okay. But we're going to run out of areas that we can renovate pretty soon. So - and we need new wall.

    So I want to thank everybody for being here. I want to thank, in particular, the Angel Moms and Dads for being here. Thank you very much. We have great respect for you. The real country, our real country - the people that really love our country, they love you. So I just want you to know that. I know how hard you fight and I know how hard a fight you're having.

    I also want to thank all of the law enforcement for the job you do. Believe me, our country loves you and they respect you greatly. And we're giving you a lot of surplus. We're giving you surplus military equipment, which a lot of people didn't like giving, previous to this administration. But hundreds of millions of dollars of surplus equipment. And as we get it, as you know, we send it down. And you have much better protection. But I really appreciate you being here.

    So the order is signed. And I'll sign the final papers as soon as I get into the Oval Office. And we will have a national emergency, and then we will then be sued, and they will sue us in the Ninth Circuit, even though it shouldn't be there. And we will possibly get a bad ruling, and then we'll get another bad ruling. And then we'll end up in the Supreme Court, and hopefully we'll get a fair shake. And we'll win in the Supreme Court, just like the ban. They sued us in the Ninth Circuit, and we lost, and then we lost in the appellate division, and then we went to the Supreme Court, and we won.

    And it was very interesting, because yesterday they were talking about the ban. Because we have a ban. It's very helpful. Madam Secretary, is that right? Without the ban, we'd have a bigger problem. We have a ban on certain areas, certain countries, depending on what's going on in the world. And we won.

    But somebody said, "President Trump lost on the ban." Well, he was right; I lost at the lower court. He - he didn't say that we ultimately won at the United States Supreme Court. They didn't want to say that. They didn't want to go that far. They were saying how I lost. The person sitting right up here - "Donald Trump lost on the ban." Yeah, I did. And then I lost a second time; you should have said that, too. And then it went to the Supreme Court and I won. Didn't want to take it that far. But we won on the ban and we won on other things, too.

    The probably easiest one to win is on declaring a national emergency, because we're declaring it for virtual invasion purposes: drugs, traffickers, and gangs. And one of the things, just to finish: We have removed thousands of MS-13 gang monsters. Thousands. They're out of this country. We take them out by the thousands. And they are monsters.

    Okay. Do you have any questions? Yeah. John, go ahead.

    Q Mr. President - (inaudible).

    AIDE: Yes, we do. There you go.

    Q You were prepared. Mr. President, a lot of the money -

    THE PRESIDENT: Were you saying I was prepared?

    Q With the microphone and prepared for questions.

    THE PRESIDENT: Oh, I thought you meant I was prepared. I couldn't believe you said that.

    Q (Laughs.) No, no, no. (Laughter.)

    THE PRESIDENT: People don't like saying that.

    Q You were prepared for questions.

    THE PRESIDENT: I am prepared. I'm always prepared.


    Q A lot of the money that goes to count toward your $8 billion is money that's being reprogrammed in the DOD budget. How can you guarantee to military families and to our men and women of the military that none of the money that would be reprogrammed to a wall will take away from other technology, other renovations, construction that is desperately needed in our military?

    THE PRESIDENT: Yeah. So, John, we had certain funds that are being used at the discretion of generals, at the discretion of the military. Some of them haven't been allocated yet, and some of the generals think that this is more important. I was speaking to a couple of them. They think this is far more important than what they were going to use it for. I said, "What were you going to use it for?" And I won't go into details, but it didn't sound too important to me.