Even as he agreed to reopen the government, the president used recycled inaccurate claims to press his case for a wall.
President Trump has addressed the nation in prime time from the Oval Office, delivered remarks from the Rose Garden, met with Democrats in the Situation Room and traveled to the border with Mexico to make his case that the government would not reopen unless he got funding for a border wall.
Thirty-five days into the shutdown, the president announced on Friday from the Rose Garden that the government would reopen until at least Feb. 15, giving Congress time to work out a deal on border security.
He did not get any funding for a wall. And on Friday, he did not advance any new arguments for building one. In fact, many of the claims he made were recycled heavily from previous comments and contained many of the same misstatements and exaggerations.
Also notable was something Mr. Trump did not say, namely that Mexico would pay for the wall, one of the most often repeated, and unsupported, claims he has made on the border funding dispute.
The essence of Mr. Trump’s pitch for a border wall — that a porous border had led to a crime and drug epidemic — remained unchanged.
Last year, he said, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement “removed 10,000 known or suspected gang members like MS-13 and members as bad as them.” (This is exaggerated; the agency reported it had removed 5,872 “known or suspected” gang members in the 2018 fiscal year.)
In addition, Mr. Trump repeated the statistic that in the past two years, ICE “arrested a total of 266,000 criminal aliens inside of the United States, including those charged or convicted of nearly 100,000 assaults, 30,000 sex crimes and 4,000 homicides or, as you would call them, violent, vicious killings.” The figures include both charges and convictions, and each arrest may represent multiple offenses. The most common charges were traffic violations and drug offenses and immigration.
“Drugs kill much more than 70,000 Americans a year and cost our society in excess of $700 billion,” the president said.
