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'Your countries are going to hell': Trump tells world leaders to shut down borders

Syra Ortiz Blanes and Antonio Maria Delgado, Miami Herald on

Published in Political News

President Donald Trump accused the United Nations of helping immigrants invade the United States and told world leaders gathered at the U.N. on Tuesday that a failure to shut down their borders was destroying their countries.

“Not only is the U.N. not solving problems it should, too often it’s actually creating new problems for us to solve. The best example is the number one political issue of our time. The crisis of uncontrolled migration.... Your countries are being ruined,” Trump said at the U.N. General Assembly.

During his speech, Trump said the international organization is “funding an assault on Western countries” because of its global programs that offer resettlement support, cash assistance and emergency aid to asylum seekers and immigrants. In recent months, the U.S. has taken back millions of dollars in funding to the U.N.

“We have successfully repelled a colossal invasion,” Trump said. “Our message is very simple: If you come illegally into the United States, you’re going to jail, or you’re going back to where you came from, perhaps further than that. You know what that means.”

He singled out London’s Pakistani-British mayor as a “terrible man” and falsely said that the U.K. capital is turning towards Islamic governance, criticizing the city’s increased diversity. He warned Europe’s leaders that the continent is in “serious trouble” because of immigration, casting immigrants as criminals and madmen that destabilize the Western world , and urging them to follow his administration’s lead.

“When your prisons are filled with so-called asylum seekers who repaid their kindness with crime, it’s time to end the failed experiment of open borders. You have to end it now,” Trump said. “Your countries are going to hell.”

At the high-level gathering of world leaders, Trump presented the worldview that underpins his mass deportation efforts in the U.S. on an international stage. While other countries touted their diversity, Trump painted a vision of a vastly different world order. He said that countries must be allowed to prevent their societies from being “overwhelmed by people they have never seen before, with different customs, religions, different everything.”

“In the United States, we reject the idea that mass numbers of people from foreign lands can be permitted to travel halfway around the world, trample our borders, violate our sovereignty, cause unmitigated crime, and deplete our social safety net. We have reasserted that America belongs to the American people,” said Trump. “And I encourage all countries to take their own stand in defense of their citizens.”

Since returning to office in January, Trump has cancelled $5 billion in aid foreign aid, including to several U.N. agencies. That includes $45 million to the Pan American Health Organization, $75 million to the U.N. Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, and $393 million for U.N. peacekeeping missions. His administration argues the financial commitments do not align with American interests.

Trump goes after Maduro

Trump also issued a stern warning to Venezuelan officials, whom he accuses of running a large drug cartel and of deliberately sending thousands of criminals into the United States with the goal of sowing chaos.

He said his administration will continue using “the supreme power of the United States military” to target what he called “Venezuelan terrorists and trafficking networks.”

Trump said maritime drug shipments from Venezuela have declined dramatically after he ordered a massive military deployment in the Caribbean – which includes eight warships, F-35 fighter jets and approximately 4,500 service members – and launched attacks against speed boats believed to be carrying drugs headed towards the United States.

 

As of now, the attacks that began early this month have left 17 people dead. The administration claims they were “narcoterrorists”

“Venezuelans are not taking big loads of drugs in boats anymore,” he said, adding that “we’ve virtually stopped drugs coming into our country by sea.” He described so-called “water drugs” as killers that have taken the lives of “hundreds of thousands of people.”

Trump reiterated his administration’s tough line on transnational criminal groups, saying he has designated several “savage drug cartels” as foreign terrorist organizations and singled out two violent gangs, MS-13 and Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang he called “probably the worst gang anywhere in the world.” He accused the groups of torturing, maiming and murdering with impunity and declared them “the enemies of all humanity.”

The president framed the measures as necessary to protect Americans, issuing a blunt threat to traffickers: “To every terrorist thug smuggling poisonous drugs into the United States of America, please be warned that we will blow you out of existence. That’s what we’re doing. We have no choice.”

‘You’re destroying your heritage’

While zeroing in on immigration, Trump criticized one of the key pillars championed by U.N. Secretary General António Guterres: addressing the climate crisis. U.N. leadership has previously warned that climate change and natural disasters could displace as many as 1.2 billion people by 2050.

Trump said the issue of carbon footprint — the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by individual or group activity — is a “hoax.” He told Europeans that green energy and immigration were a “double-tailed monster that destroys everything in its wake.”

“You cannot let that happen any longer. You’re doing it because you want to be politically correct. And you’re destroying your heritage,” he told European leaders.

Shortly before Trump spoke, Guterres gave a vastly different vision of the United Nations as a “lifeline for people in crisis” and “a lighthouse for human rights.” He warned that the principles of the agency established 80 years ago were under siege and alluded to the hardships that U.S. funding cuts have caused.

“Sovereign nations: invaded. Hunger: weaponized. Truth: silenced. Rising smoke from bombed-out cities. Rising anger in fractured societies. Rising seas swallowing coastlines. Each one a warning. Each one a question,” he said. “What kind of world will we choose? A world of raw power — or a world of laws?”

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—Miami Herald staff writer Jacqueline Charles contributed to this report.


©2025 Miami Herald. Visit at miamiherald.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

 

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