Page:Remarks by President Trump on the National Security and Humanitarian Crisis on our Southern Border.djvu/8

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