Page:Remarks by President Trump on the National Security and Humanitarian Crisis on our Southern Border.djvu/6

2/17/2019 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. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-national-security-humanitarian-crisis-southern-border/