Trump: We’re Going to Guard Southern Border With Our Military

TRUMP: “Mexico, if you look at the caravan of thousands of people coming across, I told Mexico, look, you have a cash cow in NAFTA. Nafta has been great for Mexico, has not been good for the United States. A lot of businesses have closed down because of NAFTA. You look at empty plants all over the place, and this is from years ago. They still haven’t recovered. NAFTA has been a terrible deal for the United States. We’re renegotiating the deal right now, but it’ll still be good for Mexico and for Canada.

And when this caravan came in, and this is a caravan of a lot of people coming in, in this case, from Honduras. If it reaches our border, our laws are so weak and so pathetic — you would not understand this because, I know how strong your laws are at the border. It’s like we have no border. Because we had Obama made changes. President Obama made changes that basically created no border. It’s called catch and release. You catch them, you register them, they go into our country. We can’t throw them out. And in many cases they shouldn’t be here. Many, many cases they shouldn’t be here.

And after they get whatever happens over the next two or three years, they’re supposed to come back to court. Almost nobody comes back to court. They’re in our country. And we can’t do anything about it because the laws that were created by Democrats are so pathetic and so weak. So I told Mexico — and I respect what they did, I said, look, your laws are very powerful, your laws are very strong. We have very bad laws for our border, and we are going to be doing some things.

I’ve been speaking with General Mattis. We’re going to be doing things militarily. Until we can have a wall and proper security, we’re going to be guarding our border with the military. That’s a big step. We really haven’t done that before, or certainly not very much before. But we will be doing things with Mexico, and they have to do it. Otherwise I’m not going to do the NAFTA deal. Nafta has been fantastic for Mexico, bad for us. We’ve had our car plants move to Mexico, many of them. We make tremendous numbers, millions of cars in Mexico that years ago didn’t exist. They closed in Michigan, they closed in Ohio, they closed in other places. Now they’re starting to move back because of what we’ve done with regulation and with taxes, they’re starting to come back into our country in a big way.

But I told Mexico very strongly, you’re going to have to do something about these caravans that are coming up. And I just noticed the caravan now, which is toward the middle of Mexico coming up from Honduras, is breaking up very rapidly. That’s because Mexico has very strong immigration laws, as we should have. We should have those laws. We don’t have. We have — we have immigration laws that are laughed at by everybody. And it’s got to be changed. We need the world, we need the protection, and we have to change our immigration laws at the border and elsewhere.

So Mexico has, at this moment, it seems they’ve broken up large numbers of that particular caravan and we’ll see what happens. But we’re prepared at our border. We cannot have people flowing into our country illegally, disappearing, and by the way, never showing up to court. So the court case will be set for two years, or three years, if you can believe this, and they never show up. For the most part, very rarely  do they show up. Plus, if you noticed, they are trying to hire thousands of judges so every person that walks across — and they’re taught to say the right thing. They walk across and then they go — and they’re supposed to go to court. So we suppose to have thousands of judges because we cannot have them taken out. We have to bring them before a ridiculous court system.”