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

FnopePress Release:

    Rose Garden  •  February 15, 2019  •  10:39 A.M. EST

President Trump in the Rose Garden Declaring a National Emergency on the Southern Border: Above. (White House photo)     Click image to expand.

    THE PRESIDENT: Thank you very much, everybody. Before we begin, I'd like to just say that we have a large team of very talented people in China. We've had a negotiation going on for about two days. It's going extremely well. Who knows what that means, because it only matters if we get it done. But we're very much working very closely with China and President Xi, who I respect a lot. Very good relationship that we have. And we're a lot closer than we ever were in this country with having a real trade deal.

    We're covering everything - all of the points that people have been talking about for years that said couldn't be done, whether it was theft or anything. Anything. The unfairness. We've been losing, on average, $375 billion a year with China. A lot of people think it's $506 billion. Some people think it's much more than that. We're going to be leveling the playing field.

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    The tariffs are hurting China very badly. They don't want them. And frankly, if we can make the deal, it'd be my honor to remove them. But otherwise, we're having many billions of dollars pouring into our Treasury. We've never had that before with China. It's been very much of a one-way street.

    So, that's happening. And the relationship with China is very good, but I think they finally respect our country. They haven't respected us for a long time. Not for a long time.

    The UK and the U.S., as you probably have been seeing and hearing, we're agreeing to go forward and preserve our trade agreement. You know all of the situation with respect to Brexit, and the complexity and the problems. But we have a very good trading relationship with the UK, and that's just been strengthened further.

    So with the UK, we're continuing our trade, and we are going to actually be increasing it very substantially as time goes by. We expect that the UK will be very, very substantially increased as it relates to trade with the United States. The relationship there, also, is very good.

    We have a lot of great announcements having to do with Syria and our success with the eradication of the caliphate. And that will be announced over the next 24 hours. And many other things. A lot of positive things are going on.

    We're working on a summit. And you know all about the summit. It will be in Vietnam - Hanoi. And we will - we'll be meeting in Hanoi. We'll be meeting in Hanoi. I think a lot of you will be going, I suspect. And I hope we have the same good luck as we had in the first summit. A lot was done in the first summit. No more rockets going up. No more missiles going up. No more testing of nuclear. Get back our remains, the remains of our great heroes from the Korean War. And we got back our hostages.

    But we hope we're going to be very much equally as successful. I'm in no rush for speed. We just don't want testing. The sanctions, as you know, remain. Everything is remaining. China has been helping us, and Russia has been helping us. And South Korea, I think you can say, has been - we've been working very closely with South Korea, with Japan.

    But China, Russia, on the border, have really been at least partially living up to what they're supposed to be doing. And that's okay - as per the United Nations.

    So we will have a meeting on the 27th and 28th of February, and I think that will be a very successful one. I look forward to seeing Chairman Kim. We have also established a very good relationship, which has never happened between him or his family and the United States. They have really taken advantage of the United States. Billions of dollars has been paid to them. And we won't let that happen.

    But we think that North Korea and Chairman Kim have a tremendous potential as an economic force, economic power. Their location between South Korea and then Russia and China - right smack in the middle - is phenomenal.

    And we think that they have a great chance for tremendous economic prosperity in the future. So I look forward to seeing Chairman Kim in Vietnam.

    Today, I'm announcing several critical actions that my administration has taken to confront a problem that we have right here at home. We fight wars that are 6,000 miles away; wars that we should have never been in, in many cases. But we don't control our own border.

    So we're going to confront the national security crisis on our southern border. And we're going to do it one way or the other - we have to do it - not because it was a campaign promise, which it is. It was one of many, by the way; not my only one. We're rebuilding the military, our economy is thriving like never before.

President Trump in the Rose Garden Declaring a National Emergency. with "Angel Moms" expressing their grief: Above. (White House photo)     Click image to expand.

    You look at other economies - they're doing terribly, and we're doing phenomenally. The market is up tremendously today, not that that's anything, but, you know - because I'll go back in and they'll say, "Oh, the market just went down." But the market is getting close to the new highs that we created. We have all the records. We have every record. But we're getting close to that point again where we'll create new records.

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    So our country is doing very well, economically. And we've done a lot. But one of the things I said I have to do and I want to do is border security, because we have tremendous amounts of drugs flowing into our country, much of it coming from the southern border. When you look and when you listen to politicians - in particular, certain Democrats - they say it all comes through the port of entry. It's wrong. It's wrong. It's just a lie. It's all a lie.

    They say walls don't work. Walls work 100 percent. Whether it's El Paso - I really was smiling, because the other night I was in El Paso - we had a tremendous crowd, and - tremendous crowd. And I asked the people - many of whom were from El Paso, but they came from all over Texas. And I asked them. I said, "Let me ask you, as a crowd: When the wall went up, was it better?" You were there, some of you. It was not only better; it was like 100 percent better. You know what they did.

    But that's only one example. There are so many examples. In El Paso, they have close to 2,000 murders right on the other side of the wall. And they had 23 murders. It's a lot of murders, but it's not close to 2,000 murders right on the other side of the wall, in Mexico.

    So everyone knows that walls work. And there are better examples than El Paso, frankly. You just take a look. Almost everywhere. Take a look at Israel. They're building another wall. Their wall is 99.9 percent effective, they told me - 99.9 percent. That's what it would be with us, too.

    The only weakness is they go to a wall and then they go around the wall. They go around the wall and in. Okay? That's what it is. It's very simple. And a big majority of the big drugs - the big drug loads - don't go through ports of entry. They can't go through ports of entry. You can't take big loads because you have people - we have some very capable people; the Border Patrol, law enforcement - looking.

    You can't take human traffic - women and girls - you can't take them through ports of entry. You can't have them tied up in the backseat of a car or a truck or a van. They open the door. They look. They can't see three women with tape on their mouth or three women whose hands are tied.

    They go through areas where you have no wall. Everybody knows that. Nancy knows it. Chuck knows it. They all know it. It's all a big lie. It's a big con game.

    You don't have to be very smart to know: You put up a barrier, the people come in, and that's it. They can't do anything unless they walk left or right, and they find an area where there's no barrier, and they come into the United States. Welcome.

    We've detained more people. Our border agents are doing such incredible work. Our military has been incredible. We put up barbed wire on top of certain old walls that were there. We fixed the wall and we loaded it up with barbed wire. It's very successful.

    But our military has been fantastic, and I want to thank them. And it's very necessary. We've broken up two caravans that are on their way. They just are breaking. They're in the process of breaking up. We have another one that we haven't been able to break up yet.

    We've been actually working with Mexico much better than ever before. I want to thank the President. I want to thank Mexico. They have their own problems. They have the largest number of murders that they've ever had in their history - almost 40,000 murders. Forty thousand. And they got to straighten that out, and I think they will.

    But I just want to thank the President, because he's been helping us with these monstrous caravans that have been coming up. We had one that it was up to over 15,000 people. It's largely broken up. Others have gotten through. And, in Tijuana, you have a lot of people staying there. If we didn't have the wall up, and if we didn't have the wall secured and strengthened, they would have walked right through; they'd be welcomed to the United States.

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    One of the things we'd save tremendous - just a tremendous amount on would be sending the military. If we had a wall, we don't need the military because we'd have a wall.

    So I'm going to be signing a national emergency. And it's been signed many times before. It's been signed by other Presidents from 1977 or so. It gave the Presidents the power.

    There's rarely been a problem. They sign it; nobody cares. I guess they weren't very exciting. But nobody cares. They sign it for far less important things, in some cases, in many cases. We're talking about an invasion of our country with drugs, with human traffickers, with all types of criminals and gangs.
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