Donald Trump

Floor Speech

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Mr. DURBIN. The second thing I want to say, Mr. President, is to really note something said yesterday by the President of the United States Donald Trump.

The year was 2018, 6 years ago, and President Trump challenged me and other Members of the Senate to come up with an immigration plan for the United States that included his big beautiful wall, if you remember. And so I went to work with several of my colleagues here and several on the Republican side to help write an immigration bill.

I ended up calling the White House when I thought we came up with such a bill, a bipartisan bill, and they said: Come in and see the President this morning. Well, that kind of shocked me that I could get in that quickly to see him. But I appealed to my Republican colleagues, and we went down to the White House together to meet with the President in the Oval Office.

The meeting was historic. It turned out that others had been invited--Democratic and Republican Senators and Congressmen--to discuss the issue, and they, frankly, didn't agree with the conclusions which we brought to the President.

The President spoke at length on his views about immigration. The conversation declined at some point to a level I had never expected to witness in my life. The President started saying things about immigrants in ways I thought had never been said before in the White House. He used terminology, which I am not going to repeat on the Senate floor, but it referred to a phrase of ``s-hole'' nations. You can fill in the blank if you wish. But I was shocked to hear it, and I heard him refer to several countries in this fashion. I thought to myself, How did we reach a point that we discuss immigration in such crude and vulgar terms?

After I left the White House, it leaked out what the President said, and the White House denied it. They said it didn't happen. I said it did. They said I am lying--to the point where two of my Republican Senate colleagues went on television several days later and said that I lied when I said the President made those statements.

Well, yesterday at his rally in Pennsylvania, President Trump admitted that he had used the slur that I referred to earlier to disparage Haiti and African nations during that 2018 meeting with lawmakers, bragging about the comment that sparked global outrage during his first term.

I want to put that in the Record because for 6 years I have lived with the shadow of people saying that I misled the American people as to what the President said. Yesterday, he admitted what he said. It is not for my sake but for the sake of discussing this issue of immigration because we have got to get beyond crudity and vulgarity and what we have seen in the extreme in the last several months when it comes to immigration.

I will make it clear where I stand. We need an orderly process at our border, period. Second, we should never knowingly allow a dangerous person to come into this country. Third, if a person is in this country seeking legal status and commits a dangerous crime, they should be gone, period. Fourth, we cannot accept all of the people in the world who want to come to America and live in America at this point. I wish we could, but we can't. Some are important, and I want to stand up for them. We can't allow everyone. We need an orderly process to achieve this goal.

We are a nation of immigrants, and I am proud of that fact. I hope everyone is. Let us make sure we do immigration the right way.

The reference in 2018 was an embarrassment--an embarrassment to the White House, to the Oval Office, and to the Presidency. I am glad that the President has finally admitted what happened on that day.

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