Trump' Oval Office Address on the Wall - Summary and Fact Check

“In the last two years, ICE officers made 266,000 arrests of aliens with criminal records – including those charged or convicted of 100,000 assaults, 30,000 sex crimes and 4,000 violent killings,” the president said.

“Over the years, thousands of Americans have been brutally killed by those who illegally entered our country, and thousands more lives will be lost if we don’t act right now.”

The Secure Fence Act of 2006, which authorized the construction of 700 miles of the same style of bollard fence that Trump is building at the border, was supported by 26 Senate Democrats at the time. In the House, 64 Democrats joined 219 Republican lawmakers to fund the border fencing.

Those Democrats in support of funding the bollard border fencing included:

All 54 Senate Democrats, in 2013, voted again to commit funding to secure 700 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border in the Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act — which was authored and introduced by Schumer.

In November 2018, there were close to 52,000 border crossings on the southern border, alone, marking the highest level of illegal immigration in the month of November since 2006.

“The Border Wall would very quickly pay for itself,” Trump said. “The cost of illegal drugs exceeds $500 billion dollars a year – vastly more than the $5.7 billion dollars we have requested from Congress. The wall will also be paid for, indirectly, by the great new trade deal we have made with Mexico.”

In a fact check by Breitbart News, Trump’s statement is correct, even when his claim that the annual billion-dollar drug trade will pay for the barrier.

For instance, Trump has only requested only $5.7 billion out of the $25 billion his steel border wall will cost the federal government. Every year, though, American taxpayers are billed more than $116 billion to pay for illegal immigration. The $25 billion border wall would pay for itself in the first four months of its construction should it stop illegal immigration at the border.

In 1992, a barrier in San Diego, California, was constructed, causing illegal border crossings to drop by 92 percent, according to a statement from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokeswoman Katie Waldman. In 1993 in El Paso, Texas, a barrier was built at the border, and illegal crossings dropped by 92 percent in one year alone.

In Tuscon, Arizona, a border barrier was built, and illegal border crossings fell by 90 percent over 15 years. In the neighboring sector of Yuma, Arizona, illegal immigration has dropped by 95 percent over nine years after a border barrier was constructed.

Former DHS official Elaine Duke has previously chronicled the effectiveness of border barriers, noting that after the Secure Fence Act of 2006 “even under lax enforcement standards, apprehensions in fiscal year 2016 were roughly a 10th of what they were in FY 2005.”

On average today, more than 2,000 illegal border crossers pass through the southern border every day, overwhelming and straining manpower and detention space.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement said it arrested about 159,000 foreigners during the 2018 fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, an increase of 11 percent from the previous year.

About 90 percent of the people arrested had criminal convictions, were facing pending criminal charges or had been previously issued a final deportation order by an immigration judge.

Officials said they also deported 256,085 people last year, a 13 percent increase from fiscal year 2017.

That included 5,914 undocumented immigrants [sic], 5,872 known or suspected gang members and 42 suspected terrorists, the agency's data show.

In 2017, there were 70,237 drug overdose deaths in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). That is 192 deaths a day. It should be noted that 90% of all illegal drugs come across the southern border. During the 18-day shutdown of the government, there have been at least 3,456 deaths from drug overdose, and all of these deaths are on the heads of inside-the-Beltway politicians.

This number of deaths does not include the violent deaths of one gang against another for turf to sell more of this poison that is killing our fellow citizens. Easily, that rounds out the total number of drug related deaths to well over 200 people a day....

The president on Tuesday night spoke to the nation concerning the security of our southern border. Sadly, he did not say, "The southern border represents a clear and present danger to the security of the nation, therefore I declare a national emergency to address this situation."

Had the president done this, he could have used the military under Title 10 of the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations to establish military assistance to civilian authorities to build a barrier to prevent more drugs from crossing our border and killing Americans.