Former White House counsel and current Attorney General discusses representing President Trump, labeling the Mueller investigation a communist hoax while detailing administration achievements like pardoning January 6th convicts and restoring gun rights. Tom Homan updates on immigration enforcement, noting over 10.5 million crossings under Biden versus record deportations exceeding 827,000 now, alongside the recovery of 145,000 missing children from trafficking rings. The episode concludes by framing border security as a war against narco-terrorist cartels that reduces murder rates and fentanyl poisoning, asserting that aggressive ICE operations make cities safer despite political opposition. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
Source
Participants
Main
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matt schlapp
07:39
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mercedes schlapp
07:05
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michael whatley
r06:06
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todd blanche
admin14:07
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tom homan
admin16:36
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Speaker
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Unbiased C-SPAN Coverage00:10:45
unidentified
I absolutely love C-SPAN.
I love to hear both sides.
I've watch C-SPAN every morning and it is unbiased and you bring in factual information for the callers to understand where they are in their comments.
It's probably the only place that we can hear honest opinion of Americans across the country.
You guys at C-SPAN are doing such a wonderful job of allowing free exchange of ideas without a lot of interruptions.
Thank you, C-SPAN, for being a light in the dark.
And now prominent Republican Party leaders gather to offer remarks at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference this year in Grapevine, Texas.
President Trump is not scheduled to attend this year's meeting.
So I'm a little nervous because usually when I do these things, I just want the other person to feel relaxed and at home.
But you're in the middle of this like tornado of chaos that was created because we let the communists take over our justice system at the federal level and in too many states.
There's this man who just died.
He was a Marine who had this stellar career and ended it as an independent counsel trying to, for too long, keep the illusion going that there had been Russian collusion.
The Mueller, Comey, the politicization of the FBI and DOJ, do we have any hope that we get back to the idea that no matter what your party affiliation, that you will face one system of justice again?
I mean, listen, I think that what happened for the past four years was so bad and so awful, and a big part of that was what happened with the Department of Justice and the FBI and the weaponization that we saw.
And the Attorney General, Pam Bondi, President Trump, myself, we are changing things.
Over 200 either left before we came in because they knew it was coming or were fired or took early retirement.
They are no longer employed by this department.
And when it comes to the FBI, which takes a lot of criticism, especially because of what happened over the past several years, Director Patel has cleaned house there too.
There isn't a single man or woman with a gun, federal agent, still in that organization that had anything to do with the prosecution of President Trump.
And I want folks to realize what that means.
President Trump, for the first time in modern history, has said, I am the president, and if you work in the executive branch, you work for me.
And guess what?
We can all read the Constitution.
He's right.
And unfortunately, past administrations, Republican included, have just resigned themselves to putting up with partisan actors within the Department of Justice.
Well, the best examples of the pure weaponization by the left of our system of justice.
So if you want to talk about what happened in Manhattan against President Trump, I'm happy to do so.
But I think it's better to talk about what happened after that trial, which is after that trial.
The entire country, even many Democrats, agreed that it was insane and crazy.
If you look at Fannie Willis, her case was completely annihilated and destroyed for all kinds of reasons.
And so, look, when you talk about justice, we're working hard every day.
And I don't just say working hard as a cliché.
I mean, the Attorney General and myself, every single day, seven days a week, are focused on bringing justice and it will come.
And I know every single person in this room is saying to themselves, why is it taking so long?
Raise your hand if you're just thinking that.
All right, I was basically right.
And here's the answer.
Here's the answer.
I want to talk about it.
Here's the answer.
For one, it's not taking so long.
For one, we have already done more in one year than any administration has ever done before.
If you look at what happened to the men and women convicted because of January 6th, by 5 p.m. on January 20th, every one of them was either pardoned or had their sentence commuted.
So when folks say you've done nothing, I say you have a very short memory.
When you look at the Christian community in this country, my father was a minister.
I was raised in the Midwest.
They were persecuted for four years.
Within a week of coming in, Attorney General Bondi flipped that and said, no more.
We're not going to go after Christian organizations.
We're not going to go after nonprofits that are Christians.
We're going to go after the banks that are debanking and not letting those organizations bank.
So that's something we've done.
When you talk about the Second Amendment, which had been trampled on for an entire administration, this administration has done more in 12 months to fix that where it comes to restoring gun rights to people that should have never had them taken from them, to making it easier to not having to pay tax on various types of guns that should never have been taxed in the first place.
To withdrawing from lawsuits that we don't belong in.
That's the kind of thing.
We had consent decrees all over this country where the men and women in blue were being told by some judge or some law firm that they had done something wrong.
We have removed ourselves from every single one of those unless the judge said no, and then we're fighting that too.
That is something that we have done that will matter long beyond President Trump's term in office.
Yeah, listen, folks, we are treating drug dealers like the narco-terrorists that they are.
And so I met with an that's right.
I met with an angel mom this morning, an angel grandmom who I think is going to speak at some point.
And the fact that these men, mostly men, are injecting and sending poison into our country, knowing that it will kill thousands and thousands of Americans, young people, middle-aged people, your neighbors, every single year, makes them terrorists.
And President Trump came in and said, I will stop that.
We are now treating terrorists and treating these narco-dealers as they should be treated.
We're blowing them up.
And we have the FBI, the DEA, the Marshals, HSI, our border patrol.
They are arresting drug dealers every single day like we haven't seen ever in our generation.
There's a big competition going on between Florida and Texas for all these people fleeing big, broken, blue, bankrupt cities and states.
So we've had these really serious, egregious things.
When I worked in the White House, when you're a Republican, you work in the White House, you're the subject of investigations for years and years and years.
When you're a Democrat and you work in the White House, you get a book deal.
It's asymmetrical, to say the least.
One of the things they said to me through my lawyer from the FBI is that in the unending series of investigations was, if I had any dirt on my boss or on the president I served, if I turned it over, they'd let me go and turn down the heat.
That doesn't sound American to me.
It doesn't sound constitutional to me.
We're going to have people on this stage who got pardons thanks to your department and President Trump who had prosecutions going on from two and three federal investigators at the same time.
Each one of these is a million dollars out of your savings account just to get started.
What the hell is going on with people being tortured by their own government and can that stop?
There's people that are less likely to stand up because they're afraid.
And it, look, I was a law partner at a big firm in New York City.
And when I said I was representing President Trump, they said, you can't, but don't worry, you'll get other big cases.
And I said, yes, I can, and I quit.
But listen, but that takes, not everybody can do that.
I had a wife who supported me.
And it really is the pressure that people get put on.
Even in this administration, everybody's afraid that the next administration, if we don't win, we're going to all be investigated and indicted.
Think about that.
This is not a third world country.
This is America.
And the existing administration is afraid that they're going to get indicted.
And why are they afraid?
Because that's exactly what happened during the last administration.
All of President Trump's cabinet, everybody that worked in the White House, his Secret Service detail had to go to the grand jury.
That is so extraordinarily un-American.
And you said it right.
It doesn't seem to be American.
And it's not.
And that will never, ever happen again because of what we're doing, but also because of what you all did in saying we're not going to stand for it and sending President Trump back to office.
And so as a nation, we have started the process of healing that, and we're going to continue to do our part, but you all have to continue to do your part too and keep on standing up for what you're doing here.
The one thing we could do, this isn't in your purview, but we could advocate to our senators and congressmen that we do when the Clintons did their malfeasance with the travel office and they fired those poor people.
They were made whole financially with their pensions and their legal bills.
I think we should come up with a good list of people in America who have had to lose all their financial assets to fight this lawfare.
They should be made whole by the very people who tortured them so effectively.
The voting, another thing you guys are doing a great job, Harmeek Dylan and Pam Bondi and others.
You know, we have these questions about conservatives saying, well, we don't need a federal ID, we need a state ID.
You know, that was great in the time when you couldn't get a driver's license when you were here illegally.
But now we have more than a dozen states that do that.
You have all these voting rolls which are purposely kept dirty with dead people on it, with people on who moved a long time ago on purpose because that's an open door for malfeasance and cheating.
You guys are doing a good job, a really great job, courageous job of going court to court to try to fix this problem.
And you're right, that's not necessarily completely my purview, except that we're charging and indicting illegals who voted in any election fraud case that we can.
We've charged 20 times more than was charged under Biden in one year, and we're going to keep on doing that.
And you're right, Harmeet is a rock star.
The Attorney General has prioritized that.
But, but, sorry, there's a but, but we are fighting a judiciary and we're fighting in blue states that don't want this and that say no.
And you can ask yourself why, but I think the answer is obvious, and so it's going to be a fight we continue.
We have to appeal cases, but the Supreme Court's been great for us, and a lot of our Court of Appeals has been great for us, so we'll keep on doing that.
So, one of the most important jobs you have in working with the White House counsel and the president is making sure that we pick right-minded judges.
I don't necessarily think a Republican Senate is helping us much on some of that.
It's a little too slow.
I'm not saying it's intentional because I think they have the same goal, but it seems like it takes our guys a lot longer to get through than it takes their guys to get through.
Do you believe that that's the ultimate legacy of a president is who he puts on the bench because it lives on and on?
I mean, look at what President Trump did in Trump 45.
Three Supreme Court justices and Roe v. Wade is overturned.
That's a legacy.
We see our most activist judges that we lose to every single day are without a doubt nothing more than an extension of the partisan arm of which they came from.
And I say that knowing that we appeal those and then we win on appeal, whether it's at the next level or at the Supreme Court.
We have a judge who has been reversed three times on the same case.
Justice Gorsuch had to remind the court in a written opinion.
He had to put a footer that said, hey, district court judge, you don't have to agree with what the Supreme Court says, but you have to follow it.
Okay?
It's there.
You can Google it.
It's crazy.
So yes, yes, you are right.
Getting great judges, getting conservative judges who want to do nothing more than follow the Constitution and follow the morals of which this country was built on and what makes us great is without a doubt a priority of Dave Warranton, our White House Counsel, the President, and everybody in this administration.
But if you have all these blue jurisdictions, excuse me, if you have all these communist jurisdictions, Chicago, New York City, your former hometown, Austin, fair enough.
The Keep Austin weird, and I understand this.
The Washington, D.C., where Mercy and I have raised our family.
By the way, the Attorney General of Virginia said publicly, or was made public, that he thought my kids should be slaughtered, and your kids should be slaughtered because of their parents' politics.
This is a very radical thing, violent, radical, propaganda, and they use the courts more than anything else besides schools and sometimes churches to try to pollute us and pollute our kids.
What can we do to stop bringing criminals to New York City and Washington, D.C.?
I see that Northern Virginia courthouse, which has been used very regularly when justice was fair.
Now that justice is gone, how do we bring these big cases to the red areas of the country so normal people can sit in juries and adjudicate them?
That's one of the biggest parts of our strategy going forward is making sure that we're investigating and bringing change cases in the right jurisdictions.
And it's tough because our laws require us to bring cases where the conduct occurred.
But there's a lot of ways that we can work within that to get some of our cases where we want them to be, where we're going to have a judge that we know is going to be fair.
And it's a big part of what we do.
And we can't do it every single time.
So if a federal agent is assaulted in Chicago, the law requires you charge it in Chicago.
I think we've gone to a place where the local jurisdictions, not the cops on the street, but the leadership and the mayors and the district attorneys in some of those cities do not have your best interests at heart.
And it's terrible and it's disgusting.
And I hope that it changes.
I think the media plays a big role.
But all we can do, and it's not comforting to say this, but I'll say this: what President Trump said when they tried to kill him, moments after, all you can do is fight, fight, fight.
And that's what I do every day.
That's what the Attorney General does.
That's what the President does.
And that's what we have to do too.
And that's the only way we'll have success.
And it's exhausting because fighting's tough, but that's what we have to do.
I saw a bunch of you standing, and I know who you were standing for.
You were standing for Chairman Watley.
And let me tell you something.
I've been fortunate, as a lot of you people know in the audience, I've been part of Donald Trump's polling team since the first time he ever decided to run.
And believe it or not, he was thinking about it back in 2011.
He was thinking about running against Obama.
Boy, would that have been fun.
But so I worked with several RNC chairmen, several different regimes there.
And I got to tell you, one of the most unknown or untold stories of the 24 election was the incredible job that Chairman Michael Watley and Chris Lassevita did along with Susie Wiles at the RNC.
This man, I've told him this, and I want to say it publicly.
It was like every time we asked for something in President Trump's two previous campaigns, I can't tell you how many times, no, we can't do that.
And I'll tell you what, one of the biggest reasons that we wanted to make sure that the RNC was going to be there for President Trump is because we saw elections have consequences.
You think about the switch that we saw the very first time Donald Trump came down the escalator and he said, I'm going to make America great again.
It wasn't just a campaign slogan he borrowed from Ronald Reagan.
It was a plan.
We are going to rebuild our economy.
We are going to restore our borders and keep our communities safe.
And we are going to make absolutely sure that America is strong and respected again around the world.
That's why I joined his campaign in 2015.
And we see every single day right now the fact that he is winning and America is absolutely getting better every single day because he is keeping those promises that he has made since he first came down the escalator in 2015.
unidentified
Amen.
Amen.
And then some.
The other thing is this, and I think it's why it's so important that we have Chairman Watley here.
I still like to call him Chairman Watley, even though he might be running.
His race, where he's running in North Carolina, could very well be the most important U.S. Senate race in the country this year.
If we don't keep his seat, we may lose the majority.
And we all know how bad that's going to be, to lose the majority.
He has to win.
But all the great things he did at the RNC, whether it was ballot security, whether it was raising money, going out there recruiting grassroots candidates and giving us the resources we needed to do to run an effective campaign for President Trump, he was able to do all of that.
You know, and when you look at elections, good policy is good politics.
And President Trump's agenda is really true the agenda that's driving us right now.
When you think about states like Maine with Susan Collins, you think about Ohio with John Houston, you think about Texas here.
We've got a primary, we've got a runoff, but we know that we're going to be able to hold that seat.
You look at Iowa, you look at Kentucky, you look at Michigan and Mike Rogers up there.
Every single one of these battleground states, the Republicans are running on an America first agenda.
We're running on President Trump's agenda.
My agenda is to create an economy that's going to work better for North Carolina.
It is to make sure that we're keeping our kids and our communities safe.
It is that we have 100,000 men and women in uniform in North Carolina in all five branches.
When it comes to keeping American interests and our allies safe around the world, North Carolina is going to be the tip of the spear.
But that's the case in every other one of these battleground states.
And the Democrats who ran in 24, their agenda was open borders, inflationary spending, and a woke, weak America.
They are doubling down on that in every single House race and every single Senate race across the country right now.
They are doubling down on stupid.
And the voters are not going to go there.
unidentified
And I think we have the ability in these midterm elections.
And by the way, I was doing the polling back in 2002 at the RNC and also for the NRCC.
I worked for Chairman Tom Davis back then, when with the last time we defied history, we actually picked up seats during the first midterm.
Normally what happens over the last 50 years, that history says you lose 25 to 30 seats.
But I'm not going to be happy, especially if when it comes to the Senate, not only that we keep the Senate, but we need to pick up seats.
And I think several seats we can actually have a shot at picking up.
Agreed.
I think we can pick up New Hampshire.
I think we can pick up Georgia.
By the way, John Asoff, the crazy liberal who tries to pretend he's a moderate, you know what he said the first thing he's going to do when the Democrats, if they, God forbid, get a majority in the U.S. Senate, you know what he wants to do?
Impeach Donald Trump.
That's not moderate.
That's how crazy they are.
And look at one of the lessons we learned from the 25 elections.
You look at Mikey Sherrill, the governor of New Jersey.
You look at Abigail Spamberger, the governor of Virginia.
How did they run?
They told us they were moderates.
They lied.
We see what they're doing.
Mikey Sherrill doing Sanctuary City stuff.
By the way, she's raising property taxes.
Abigail Spamberger, she's talked about raising over 100 new taxes.
Plus, she's doing that crazy radical redistricting where she's going to redistrict out for, try to redistrict out four Republican members of Congress.
And Roy Cooper is an absolutely card-carrying member of the woke mob.
And he's going to portray himself as a moderate.
He's going to tell you that he wants to work across the aisle.
The fact is that Roy Cooper vetoed more legislation, more bills, than every other governor in the history of North Carolina combined.
This is a guy who has never seen a dollar that he didn't want to tax and spend.
I've never seen, by the way, a tax I didn't want to cut.
This is a guy who is the most soft on crime governor in the history of North Carolina.
This is a guy who vetoed legislation to tell sheriffs they need to honor ICE detainers and get criminals the hell out of North Carolina.
This is a guy who on every single 80-20 issue is on the 20% side with the Radical Democrats.
And he's made it clear.
When he announced that he was running, he said that he would have voted against the One Big Beautiful bill because he wants you to be paying taxes on overtime and tips and Social Security because he wanted you to be able to have to pay the biggest tax hike in American history.
This is a guy who let 3,500 hardened criminals out of prison in North Carolina because he didn't want them to get COVID.
He took that list.
He hid it under court order.
He sealed it.
And he promised the people of North Carolina, none of these are violent criminals.
You know what?
We got that list a month ago.
He lied.
He lied to the people of North Carolina.
51 of them were serving life sentences.
65 committed murder.
One of them got rearrested and re-released 13 more times before he got on a Charlotte light rail last summer and murdered a beautiful Ukrainian lady named Irena Zaroska.
Murdered her in cold blood.
And you know what?
Her blood is on Roy Cooper's hands because he should have never been on the streets and he should have never been on that light rail car.
We need to do better in North Carolina.
We need to make sure that we have a champion for the conservative cause.
We need to make sure that we have an ally for Donald Trump in the United States Senate.
That's what I'm going to be when I beat Roy Cooper and permanently end his career.
unidentified
Like I said, Chairman Watley's race may be the most important in the country.
It's not, we sort of have to win it.
We have to win it.
And I'll tell you the other thing is this, and you and I have talked about this.
One of the reasons we didn't do great, quite frankly, back in 2018 during the first President Trump midterm was because 11 million Trump voters stayed home during the midterms.
This is huge, by the way, because when you look at the congressional races, I think it's 28 out of the 39 kind of battleground districts that both parties are looking at, Donald Trump won in the 24 election.
The Democratic base, the crazy left, the Marxists that Benny was just talking about, they are motivated.
The Zoron Mandanis, and by the way, the Democrats are nominating a whole bunch of new Zoron Mandanis in these primaries, and we're going to have some huge advantages there.
But I've always told President Trump the first time he came back to CPAC after he left office, I told him that's when I knew we were going to win in 24.
Because I knew how motivated the people were in this room, and they went back home, they went back to Washington State and New York, California, the battleground states, and they went and spread the message.
We need to do that again.
We cannot be complacent.
These are, as the president said last night, these are the most important midterm elections in our lifetime.
You know, when I took over the RNC, I sat down, I had breakfast with President Trump.
And after a couple minutes of chit-chat, he looked me straight in the eye.
He said, all right, Michael, what's the plan?
How are we going to win?
And I told him, we are going to do two things and only two things.
We are going to get out the vote and we are going to protect the ballot.
We talked for about 20, 30 minutes about what it meant to get out the vote and how we were going to motivate people who had Trump signs in their yard or Trump stickers on their truck, but they hadn't registered to vote or they hadn't voted in four years or six years or eight years.
We were going to get them to go vote early.
We were going to get them to vote by mail.
We were going to get them there on election day.
We spent about 20 minutes talking about election integrity and the fact that I was going to build and did the first ever national election integrity program at the RNC and make sure that we are going to stop the steal.
And that is how we were able to win that election cycle in 24.
We need to do the same thing.
And we need you and we need every person who pays attention in this election cycle.
We need every conservative, every Republican, every patriot across this country to focus on two things.
Get out the vote and protect the ballot.
And when we get that done, we are going to be able to expand this majority in the House.
We'll expand our majorities in the Senate.
And we will make absolutely sure that Donald Trump is going to get a four-year term, not a two-year term, because if the Democrats win again, like they did in 2018, it is impeachments, it is hoaxes, it is investigations, and it is an agenda that is off the rails.
Elections have consequences, and this is, as John just said, the most important midterm that we've ever had in our country.
And we cannot left the woke mob.
We cannot let the left win this election cycle and take away this agenda that we're fighting for every single day.
unidentified
Thank you.
And one last thing.
I'm not going to be happy if we just keep the majorities.
We need to increase the majorities.
And one more thing, make sure you vote in the CPAC straw poll.
It's at the top of the app, literally right at the top.
Let your voice know who you prefer in the 28 presidential primary, plus a lot of other issues in there.
Look, the brave men and women of ICE are stepping up to help secure the airports with the people at Left TSA, the people that are calling in, because they've got to go get a job to feed their families.
We've got to fill those gaps because the security airport is important.
We've got a heightened threat posture right now.
We need to make sure those airports are secure.
We need to help Americans get through those lines.
And if we see any illegal activity in the airports, we're going to make arrests.
And I want to say, can we give literally a round of applause to Mrs. Homan and the family who has supported Tom Loveman in allowing him and saying, yes, go back and serve this great country and this great president.
Well, over 10.5 million illegal aliens came to the border that we know of.
We don't know the unknown gotaways, but we also have 2.1 million known gotaways captured on video, drone traffic, or censor traffic.
Why did 2.1 million people pay more to the cartels to get away?
Why didn't they pay less, turn themselves into border patrol, get released in 24 hours, get a free airline ticket to the city of your choice, get a free hotel room, get three meals a day, get free medical care?
Why did 2.1 million people pay more not to take advantage of that giveaway program?
That's just scared the hell out of all of you because it scares the hell out of me.
Well, thank God we got President Trump in the Oval Office because we're removing thousands of these national security threats with the health of the FBI and the intelligence communities.
But we got a lot more to find.
And you've got under Joe Biden, $12,000, $13,000 a day.
And so moving into self on this deportation, you were in charge, as the president said, okay, Tom, I need you to implement this mass deportation program.
And there's a phenomenon also happening with self-deportation.
So we also have that opportunity of people saying, okay, you're going to get paid a certain amount of money and we can facilitate and get you out of the country.
And the numbers there are high, but the ones we're leaving on their own, CBP has an ability to track when they log in down on the border.
Look, we're over 2 million self-removals.
And the reason that is because they know ICE is out there.
There's no free zone anymore.
You enter this country legally.
If you're in this country legally, we're looking for you.
We're going to find you.
We're going to deport you.
And that message, ICE activities, people want to tackle ICE.
One of the reasons we have the most secure border in history of this nation is because of the great work of the Border Patrol and President Trump's leadership.
But it's because people are seeing what ICE is doing across the country.
And they're saying, hell no.
I don't want to give my life savings to the criminal cartel to get the border and not be released.
And if I happen to be getting by the Border Patrol, there's no free zone anymore.
ICE is looking for it.
Under the Biden administration, he told ICE, you can't arrest an illegal alien unless he's convicted of a serious offense.
President Trump says, get all, get them all, and that's what we're doing.
And I think one of the effects of securing the border, one of the effects of having ICE on the streets is making our cities more safe.
There's no question.
We're seeing murder rates going down in these cities.
I mean, what's your sense in what ICE has been able to do to identify these gang members, these illegal aliens who are criminals in our country, that we've seen these tragic stories of women being raped, young women being killed?
Tell us about that.
What's the impact in these cities, in our communities, knowing that ICE has taken out a lot of these illegal aliens who are criminals?
We average between 60 and 70 percent of those we arrest are criminals.
You're talking over half a million public safety threats that we kicked out of this country.
That's going to have a significant impact.
And that's why we say we'll prioritize it.
And I want the folks to know, just because we say we're prioritizing the public safety threats and national security threats doesn't mean we're not looking for everybody else.
And that's where I said right now the number is about 62% criminal, the other 38% are non-criminals.
We're going to force an immigration law law, apology.
But if you've got a child rapist here and an illegal alien here, you're going to get this guy first.
But you're not going to forget about this guy.
You're going to get him too.
But it's just a matter of who you get first.
But I want to be clear.
The instructions to ICE is enforced immigration law.
You find an illegal alien, you're going to arrest him.
And, you know, I know for us at CPAC, we have the CPAC Center for Combating Human Trafficking.
You know, we've talked to victims.
We've had engaging with them, understanding the atrocities.
And you hear about these rape trees in Arizona, where they bring over the cartels, bring over these young women who are then raped in places in Arizona.
They're sex trafficked, they're sexually assaulted.
I mean, it's truly horrific to watch what has happened and what was allowed to happen under the Biden years.
Tell us about this mission of finding the missing children.
Just but children don't have that digital footprint.
I explained to the president, they don't have the digital footprint, so we've got to count on the digital footprint of who they were released to, these unvetted sponsors.
And when we started this operation, we quickly found out, number one, they weren't vetted properly.
And let me say, son, that's 145,000 missing children that the last administration lost and weren't even looking for.
And did we rescue them out?
Look, some of these children were with their parents just hiding out, but many, too many were victims of sex trafficking, being sold for sex, and being in forced labor.
President Trump's leadership literally saved thousands of young children's lives, and we're not done.
I have promised the president, the president promises the American people we'll do everything we can to run down every lead.
And when we finish the leads, we'll do it again.
Until the last day of this administration, you got my word, we'll not give up in this effort to find every one of them.
And then, and then, you know, when you go back to this, I remember hearing stories about, and when I was at the White House, they would explain, they would literally, the kids would have the same address.
So they would send like 200 kids to the same address to the same quote-unquote sponsor.
Then they weren't doing DNA testing either.
So really, I mean, what I just can't imagine.
Like, I can't understand how the Biden administration just wouldn't get that right.
And, you know, when you look at the narco-terrorists, the cartels, really, it's been a war against the cartels, which I am so glad that President Trump and the administration has made this into a priority.
Tell us about that and the work that you all are doing to ensure that the drug cartels, you know, that we're basically trying to dismantle them and put the fear of God in them.
I love when they blow up those boats.
I don't know about you all.
Every time there's one of those narco-terrorist votes blown up, I'm like, yes, let's do it again.
You know, when I spoke at the RNC just before the election during my speech, I said something that the very next day, the death threats would come rolling in from the cartels.
Because I said, you know, my conversation with President Trump, he's going to wipe these drug cartels off the face of the earth.
And the death threats are coming in.
And he's doing it.
What President Trump's doing, I've been doing this since 1984, what President Trump's doing, he says, you know what, why do we keep playing the home game?
Let's play the away game.
Let's get this stuff before it gets here.
And he's done it.
So, you know, taking out these criminal cartels, look, cartels are going broke.
They're losing money.
Matter of fact, the intelligence force I see there, they're concentrating on Asia, Asia, and Europe right now because they know it's hard here.
President Trump is not going to give up.
I tell you what, it's going to get a hell of a lot better real soon.
What I explained to them, we have the same policies now that we had under Obama and Clinton.
It's not a matter of policy, it's a matter of the executive branch.
Elections have consequences.
We're enforcing laws that you wrote.
And you want to sit there and call us racists and Nazis?
If we're racist and Nazis for enforcing the law, what's that make you?
You wrote it.
You invented it.
And you give us money to enforce it.
So these negotiations, they say, some say they want to abolish ICE.
Others say, no, we just aren't.
The new words are reform ICE.
Trust me, I'm in the room.
It's not about reforming.
It's about crippling ICE.
It's about taking away their authorities.
And any Border Patrol agent, ICE agent watching this, I'm telling you right now, Tom Holmo will never sell out your authorities.
We're going to make sure you have them job.
So look, because they hate ICE so much, they're willing to punish the men and women of TSA, Coast Guard, you know, CISA, all these great people trying to keep this country safe.
They're punishing them because they don't like ICE.
You know what?
If you want to have a discussion with ICE, then let's do that.
Well, why you got all these people out of work?
They can't buy groceries for the kids.
They can't pay the tuition.
They can't pay their rent.
That is just cruel.
You want to talk about inhumane?
What's more inhumane than that?
Realize you're sitting up on Capitol Hill making a lot of money.
You're getting paid.
So you know what?
Let's pass a law that if we want to shut down the government, you don't get paid until you open the government.
And I look at the clock and I'm thinking, okay, the only ones won't call me at 2.30 in the morning, POTUS.
But look, he called me that morning, says, what are you doing?
Sleeping?
He goes, I need you in Minnesota.
I said, when?
He goes, today.
He said, all right.
I says, what am I doing?
He goes, de-escalate the situation.
He goes, get up there and take control of it.
And, you know, Greg Bulvino did a great job.
The Board Patrol Committee.
They all did a great job up there.
But he wanted a fresh face.
And I work for the President of the United States.
What he tells me to do, I do.
Now, I gave him the pros and cons of going up there, but a lot of people questioned, why would you meet with Governor Watts?
Why would you meet with the Attorney General?
Why would you meet the Mayor?
Because you can't fix a problem.
You know what makes them tick.
So look, me and Mayor Friday never agree on anything, but we got him to do the job of public safety, and his police officer started responding to our 911 calls when we got surrounded.
The AG, I talked to the AG, and there's a law that can't honor detainers in the county jails.
And my discussion with him, I said, what's illegal?
Maybe not honor detainees.
We'll litigate that, but why not call us before we release them?
You don't have to hold them a minute past your normally hold them.
And that's why now we have unprecedented assistance from the counties.
We got great assistance from the state police.
Now we got problems at Whipple Building.
State police show up.
A sheriff shows up.
We got law enforcement finally working on law enforcement.
And because of our work up there, that state is less of a sanctuary state, which is the goal across the country.
We want to arrest a bad guy in the safety and security of a jail.
That way, safer for the community, safer for the agent, safer for the ailing.
And the good part about this, if I can get one guy to arrest one bad guy into jail rather than sending a team of six, seven people on a few job scene look for him, one guy does a job.
Now we don't send seven guys looking for him.
So what did I just do?
One guy's in the jail, six guys are on the street arresting more people.
What's great about him, first of all, he's a tough guy.
But what I like about him is he recognizes from the beginning that he has career folks who've done 20, 30 years running CBP, running ICE, running CIS, running, you know, he's got all these career professionals.
Let them run their agencies because they got the knowledge to do it.
He'll give us the guidance.
He'll give us the head cover.
But he already dug in.
He's digging in deep.
And I talked to him this morning, and he's 100% in the game.
He's doing it for the right reasons.
Look, he left the senator job, which is a pretty sweet job.
So, you know, for the Democrats who want to keep beating up on ICE and want to shut down DHS, you're not going to stop us.
You're not going to stop us.
We're going to do the job.
If you don't like it, change the damn law because you're wrong.
But I have buried through my career the saddest thing I've ever done is hand the folded flag to a child or a spouse of a fallen board of Cho as an ICE officer.
I never want to do that again.
So please pray with me that every man and woman at ICE, every man and woman aboard Cho, go home to their families every day.
That Lord cover you, that his precious blood be over you in everything that you do, and that he keeps you safe and gives you wisdom and know that you are loved.
And we thank you, Tom Holman.
Thank you for your service.
unidentified
God bless you.
I'll look now at some of our live coverage coming up Friday on the C-SPAN networks.
On C-SPAN, the U.S. House gavels in at 9 a.m. Eastern to debate and vote on legislation that would change U.S. maritime security law to address the unlawful seizure of any U.S.-owned property by foreign governments.
On C-SPAN 2 at 9 a.m. Eastern, House Democrats hold a news conference to introduce the Warrior Act, codifying the role of women in the military.
The U.S. Senate returns and continues debate on a Republican bill that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote and to show a photo ID to cast a ballot, the Save America Act.
And on C-SPAN 3, a conversation with Democratic Congressman Jason Crowe about free speech and the military.
You can watch live coverage of all these events also on C-SPAN Now, our free mobile app, and online at c-span.org.
C-SPAN's Washington Journal, our live forum, inviting you to discuss the latest issues in government, politics, and public policy from Washington, D.C. to across the country.
Coming up Friday morning, we'll talk about reports of irregular financial trading patterns that have emerged since the start of U.S.-Israeli operations in Iran with Craig Holman of Public Citizen, also Henry Olson of the Ethics and Public Policy Center on Campaign 2026, U.S.-Israeli Combat Operations Against Iran, and Political News of the Week.
C-SPAN's Washington Journal, join the conversation live at 7 Eastern Friday morning on C-SPAN, C-SPAN Now, our free mobile app, or online at c-SPAN.org.
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court hears a case on the constitutionality of President Trump's announcements on birthright citizenship and whether he can restrict or end automatic citizenship for those born in the U.S. Listen to live coverage of Trump versus Barbara, beginning at 10 a.m. Eastern on C-SPAN.
C-SPAN Now, our free mobile video app, and online at c-SPAN.org.
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Florida Democratic Congresswoman Sheila Scherfilis-McCormick appeared at a rare House Ethics Subcommittee hearing that examined fraud allegations made against her.
She's facing federal criminal charges, including conspiracy to steal $5 million in FEMA funds, money laundering, and campaign