0 to decide a claim of asylum. someone says they come because i'm facing oppression. there has to be a way to determine that quicker for people seeking safety from persecution. mayokas will detail this after i finish at homeland security. one step we're taking. over the summer we saw a huge spike of venezuelans traveling through mexico and attempting to enter the united states without going through our legal processes. we responded by using an insuring that there are two safe and lawful ways for someone leaving the country to come to america. go first, if they are seeking asylum, they can use an app on their cell phone called cbp one, o-and-e. you have to spell it out, not the number one trend. to schedule at a point of entry and make their asylum claim there without crossing the border unlawfully and having the decision determined by an asylum officer do they qualify. second, in october we worked with the mexican government to launch a new parole program. there is another program, you all know but the public may not called the parole program. it immediately show results. it reduced the number of people crossing the border unlawfully. the way this parole program works, one must have a lawful sponsor here in the united states who agrees to sponsor you to get your. then that person has to go undergo rigorous background checks and apply from outside the united states and not cross the border illegally in the meantime. if they apply and their application is approved, they can use the same app the cbp one app to present at a port of entry. and to be able to work in the united states legally for 2 years. that's the process. up but if their application is denied, or they attempt to cross unlawfully, they will be retur e eligible for this program after that. so the program is available, if they apply and they do it properly find. if they don't apply and they try to come through, they will not have the opportunity to use the program. this new process is orderly, safe, inhumane. it works. since we created new program, the number of venezuelans trying to enter america without going through a legal process has dropped dramatically from about 1,100 per day to less than 250 per day. on average. that is several hundred people on average every single day who are not crossing into america illegally. today i am announcing that my administration is going to expand the parole program for people not only from venezuela but from cuba, nicaragua, and haiti. again, these four countries, venezuela, cuba, nicaragua, and haiti, these account for most of the people now traveling into mexico to try to start a new life by crossing the border into the united states of america on the southwest border. we anticipate this action will substantially reduce the number of people attempting to cross our southwest border without going through a legal process. in fact today i am announcing that the mexico has agreed to allow return up to 30,000 persons per month who try get caught and get sent back from those four countries. or apprehended while attempting to unlawfully cross the southwest border. my messages this. if you are trying to leave cuba, nicaragua, or haiti, or have agreed to begin a journey to america, do not, do not to show up at the border. stay where you are and apply illegally from their. of starting today if you don't apply to the legal process you will not be eligible for this new parole program. let me reiterate: you need a lawful sponsor in the united states of america number one and you need to undergo rigorous background check, number two. if your application is approved and you show up at a u.s. airport or when and where directed, [coughs] excuse me you have access. if your application is denied or you attempt to cross in unlawfully you will not be allowed to enter. look. we should all recognize as long as america is the land of freedom and opportunity people will try to come here. that is what many of our ancestors did. it is no surprise it is happening again today. we can't stop people from making the journey but we can require them to come here that they come here in an orderly way under u.s. law. let me say it again. the actions we are announcing today will make things better. will make things better, but will not fix the border problem completely. there is more that happens to be done. i lay that out in the first week i was here. that will not happen until a congressman accesses funds and a comprehensive migration plan ia set on day one. until congress has acted, i can act where i have legal capacity to do so. last year i brought together 20 leaders, many of you were there in the western hemisphere heads of state for the flow of immigration to expand pathways and diminish the border hum humanely. the leaders of the hemisphere building on those efforts that i lead when i was vice president to expand economic nations in north and central america so people there can improve their economic prospects at home instead of having to leave the united states. most people would much rather stay in the country they are if they can feed their families, be safe, send their kids to school and have opportunities. it's not like people have heard me said it before, so i people are sitting around a table somewhere in central america saying i have a great idea, let's sell everything we have. let's give it to a coyote, smuggler. they will take us on a harrowing journey for a thousand miles to get to the united states and then we will illegally cross the border they will drop us in the desert and where we spoke to mike won't speak the language, won't that be fun? i'm not being facetious. president harris lead this effort to make things better from the countries which they are leaving and thanks to her leadership which he has been able to generate more than $3.2 billion from the private sector to create jobs and opportunities in el salvador, honduras, and guatemala. tell people to stay in their home countries where they will be safer and they have some opportunities. we have also set up joint patrols and law enforcement with mexico and guatemala. they share real-time information on location at the smugglers are using to convince migrant groups to cross illegally. that is what they are doing, they are out recruiting. recruiting and taking all the savings of everything they have two take them on an incredibly dangerous journey. we embedded our border patrol officers on the mexican patrols to detect and raid human smuggling operations. thus far, there have more than 7,000 arrests of human smugglers in the last six months. 7,000. that is not just human smuggling at the border, we are focused on cracking down drug smuggling. which is a serious and deadly promise or i'm sorry, problem, and i made a promise that i would try this. my administration has record funding that added hundreds of additional border patrol agents and installed new cutting edge technologies that you can use effectively like an x-ray machine detailed able to look through large containers to determine what is in the container. at the border. for example, since august of last year's border patrol have seized more than 20,000 pounds of deadly fentanyl. that is enough to kill as many as a thousand people in this country. 20,000 pounds of fentanyl, it's a killer. it is a flat killer. next week i'm going to travel to mexico, we will meet with president lopez, we have a big agenda. from climate crisis to economic development and other issues but one up or of that agenda is strengthening our between our issues. i will visit the border myself this sunday in el paso to assess border enforcement operations. meet with the local officials communion, community leaders and assess what they needed they don't have and make it public what they conclude they need they don't have too can be done at convince my republican colleagues i should do some something. and another migration is putting a real strain on the border and border communities. it can't to do anything but that. we will get these communities more support, and i want to thank all the nonprofits, the faith groups, community leaders and other volunteers who will make sure vulnerable immigrants will have what they need to survive whether it's food warm clothing or medical care right after their arrival. these groups represent our nation's generosity, they really do. they really do. they are a powerful rebuke to the hate many people face when they arrive here legally. let me close with this. are problems on the border didn't arise over nice and will not be solved overnight, it's a difficult problem. it is clear that immigration is a political issue and extreme republicans will always run on, but now they have a choice. they can keep using immigration to score political points or they can help solve the problem. they can help solve the problem and come together to fix the broken system. before congress adjourned for the holidays, some democrats and republicans a few of them got together, both sides up in the senate decided they would put together comprehensive plan immigration. republican leadership and other republic, i don't know exactly who did it, rebuked it and rejected it and it broke up. just like they rejected my planter go years ago. just like they rejected my recent request for an additional $3.5 billion to secure and manage the border with more holding facilities, better transportation, additional funding for 2000 new assi asylum officers and to more rapidly adjudicate for people when they come here and so much more. think about a. if this were something if we were to have a hundred more immigration officers to see to it we were able to import some and we needed very badly it wouldn't take much time to get it, would it? it would be done or conversely, if criminal gangs come in to the nation or i mean -- but when it comes to immigration it seems like there is a better issue. a better issue for them than trying to settle. look, we need more resources to secure the border. yet again, extreme republicans have said no. many republicans agree we should do something. but it is time to stop listening to the inflammatory talk. it's time to look at the record. because as i've always done i will sit down with anyone who has good faith and wants to fix our broken immigration system and it's hard. on the best of circumstances it's hard. but for the most extreme republicans if they continued to demagogue this issue and reject solutions i am left with one choice. to act on my own and do as much as i can on my own to try to change the atmosphere. immigration reform used to be a bipartisan issue. we should make it that way again. it's not only the right thing to do, it's economically the smart thing to do. that's why immigration reform is supported by everyone, think of this now. i want to remind the public. immigration reform is supported by the american labor movement. unions. it is supported by religious leaders. it is supported by the u.s. chamber of commerce. we can secure our border, fixed immigration system to be orderly, fair, safe, and humane. we can do all this while keeping lit the torch of liberty that has led generations to america. many of our forbearers, many come we can do this by remembering who we are. i will save us a million times, we are the united states of america. the idea of this is beyond our capacity. i just don't buy. we can do anything if we do it together. you've heard me say it, god bless you all, may god protect our troops, i will stop at a few minutes, secretary mayorkas and i will have been correlated, he will be speaking much greater details and will take questions at the detect ohmic apartment apartment land security headquarters. this'll be a hard one to deal with but we have to do with the. it's with who are. >> active it say it is what's your take? >> i think it is a human right if your family is being persecuted. and being dealt with in a way like i thought it was a human right for in germany to be able to go escape and get help where they could. but the other side of this is their people in this country who have basic rice stomach rights. basic fundamental rights. they are not criminals, they are not a problem. they have their background checks are real. look. if you think about it, there is not a whole lot of countries people would rather live in than here. i mean sincerely. i think about this and i think this is sometimes the team looks at me like maybe i'm out of my mind here. all kidding aside. if you just said tomorrow all right, for the next year you can move to any country you want without any questions, how many people do you think would leave the united states? i can name many of the 147 countries i have been to, there are more than that. i think a lot would be willing to leave and come here. there is a rationale that has to be an orderly process. but it is -- and there are other ways we can do with this as i said. you may remember, i don't think you're old enough when i was doing it as a senator when i came up with a proposal to have billions of dollars of funding for the central america to keep people where they are. remember, we were putting -- it was very, very precise. for example, if a country wasn't economic difficulty and most of them are because of climate and other things, and we said okay that is a problem, guess what they don't have lighting in town square, they can't -- they can't assure the safety of people walking in the streets. well, if their leader asks for money, we made them sign a proposal that they will do lighting in the town squares and what they will do exactly we checked it out, the we put it id when it began to work or hospitals come we have hospitals that don't function because they don't have the following. well one of the reasons people will stay is if we improve the hospital, we were doing that. end of the thing i am so presumptuously to say proud of the vice president, she went beyond the united states. she contributed to try to get the rest of the world is a look, this makes sense. she got commitments of 3.5 is it? $3.2 billion. there's a lot to be done. think about it, even back in days one... it's so easy to demagogue this issue. it's so easy to demagogue it. and you hear a number of our friends the republicans saying you know, they don't even want me to speak english anymore, they want me to speak -- they will take over my community whoever they are at the time. but you know that is what a lot of folks went through all the way back to the 1800s. it's not new it's part of nature and fear but there has to be an orderly way. i know we can make it much, much better. >> mr. president why did you decide now is that finally the right time to visit the border? or public and ask you to do it since the beginning. >> the borough republicans haven't been serious about it at all. come on. they haven't been serious at a all. i wanted to be sure that i knew what the near outcome was on title 42 before i went down. we don't have it yet so i had to operate -- i don't like title 42. but it is the law now, we have to operate within it. my prediction is -- not particular unsightly insightful about this it will go away in my prediction. then we we have used title ix, title 8. right? in my right? title eight. which is we can implement what we are doing here plus some other things. there is a rational way we can announce but i couldn't wait once those supreme court ruled they would not make the final decision on title 42 for some time for another who knows. probably not until june and that range. i don't know. that for a fact. to be able to lay this out. but look, mayor arcus is waiting to impress you all all kidding aside. >> are you concerned about their requiring airline tickets that they are toward welfare migrants? >> yes but there are also ways along the border as well. >> so the cease-fire proposed by president putin for the orthodox christmas on january 6/70 of a reaction to that? >> i am reluctant to respond anything put in says. i find it interesting, he was ready to bomb hospitals and nurseries and churches on the 25th and new year's. i think he is trying to find some oxygen. thank you so much. >> are you still monitoring the speaker's race? are you still walk watching speaker's race? [speaking over each other] >> harris: awkward. all right. let's get back to the border. we can get to the rest of everything that just happened at the very end of that that was so confusing, let's talk about this. i want to bring in former acting homeland security secretary chad wolf, you and i have been perch since before last hour watching the president, what is your first take on his first words as president at the border with mexico? >> well i thought overall, harris, the speech was a little confusing. it was meandering and in places contradictory. it was clear the president wasn't really sure what he was talking about. he talked about a number of different programs that weren't accurate, he talked about gang violence in central america as a basis to claim asylum, that's not true under u.s. law. i think that is important. he talked about continuing to process more illegal aliens into the country instead of actually solving the problem. he talked about parole in the venezuelan program that started back in october, and yes, we may see if you were venezuelans of the border but guess what question what the numbers continue to increase month after month after month. it's different populations. so applying this perl program which i would say is not lawful to other populations is still not going to solve the problem at the end of the day. of course he concluded with title 42. this is an authority that he has said he doesn't like, they are fighting in front of the supreme court yet he is going to extend at title 42. so it's very unclear what the strategy is with the long-term strategy is. for the border. i think that speech raised more questions than answers. >> harris: how could it not? he hasn't had eyes or hands on the situation on his own and the two people that he put in charge have been so woefully incompetent that it is almost laughable. and one he gave the set up to the homeland secretary mayorkas, everyone is waiting to talk to him, no, i don't think anybody is. and the vice president, kamala harris, what has she done as a border czar? what a mess. you extend title 42 which he says he doesn't like, did he tell us why doesn't like us? did he tell us what he wants to see in its place? does he know that in between titles 8 and 9? >> i don't think he does. again, i think what it shows you is there is no comprehensive plan for that border. they do not have a border security strategy. they have title 42 strategy, by his own admission which will go away this year. what it's a strategy after that? why -- i don't understand why they are now simply trying to come up with a strategy that they have known, they have been in this problem over 24 or about 24 months now. and yet this feels like a solution here at the last minute they have come up with in trying to figure that out. harris, he also mentioned congress. i have to come back to this because this is a point i think the viewers need to really understand. he keeps talking about republicans or members of congress who won't help. what they are advocating for is amnesty. what he put forward at the beginning of his administration of of course that he mentioned senator sinema and senator tillis, they are talking about amnesty for my 3 million people. someone needs to explain to me and others on how amnesty equals border security. the two have nothing to do with one another and yet they are conflating the issue and somehow trying to convince the american people that if you give amnesty to 3 million people who have been here years and years and years that somehow that will stop 230,000 people coming here every month. >> harris: it won't. >> it's disingenuous,