which of course, is everywhere and has infected everything. >> university of pennsylvania law school professor spoke about the limits of free expression on college campuses. at eight eastern on c-span's q --. -- q&a. a cabinet meeting, president trump called on congress to pass an immigration reform law. from the white house, this is a half hour. president trump: hello, everybody. thank you very much for being here. this is a cabinet meeting and we have plenty of things to discuss and plenty of success. we had a tremendous amount of success. we're working however, right now on immigration, which has been going on for many years. we have come up with a lot of solutions. but we have democrats who don't

want to approve anything. democrats think this is bad for the election that's coming up. unfortunately, there are a lot of people suffering. that's unfortunate. unrelated and before we get into that, the new employment claims recently out yesterday show that we have the lowest level in nearly a century. that's something that's an incredible statistic. half a century. that's a long time. and the economy is booming. we're renegotiating trade deals. we're doing very well on those trade deals. in fact, taking a little period. we put tariffs on certain countries, certain industries. where it's been very unfair to the united states. our treasury has taken in billions of dollars, and these other countries are coming along that have not treated us well and they are negotiating very vigorously. this should have taken a long time before my administration came into being.

for some reason, for 25, 30 years, nobody ever looked at trade deals. they're out of control how bad they are. but we are going to make them very good and we are going to make them fair for both countries, for our country and whichever country we're dealing with and there are plenty of them because they're all bad. there's nothing good. my administration is also acting swiftly to address the illegal immigration crisis on the southern border. loopholes in our immigration laws all supported by extremist open border democrats. and that's what they are. they are extremist open border democrats. if you look at nancy pelosi, you look at chuck schumer, you'll see tapes where they wanted to have borders. they needed borders for security. just a short while ago, number of years ago, i see chuck schumer, we must have borders. hillary clinton, we must have borders. if people penetrate our borders, we need to get them out of the country.

meantime, people are suffering because of the democrats. so we've created and they created and they let it happen a massive child smuggling industry. that's exactly what it's become. traffickers. if you think about this, human traffickers are making a fortune. it's a disgrace. these loopholes forced the release of alien families and minors into the country when they illegally cross the border. since 2014 alone, nearly 200,000 unaccompanied alien minors have been released into the united states as a result of democrat-backed loopholes, including catch and release, which is one of the worst. you catch them and then you release them. you might as well save time. don't bother catching them. this is what we are stuck with. they are the worst immigration laws in the world. the world is laughing at the

united states and they have been for years. these alien minors were separated and sent all the way up here alone, but they really came up with coyotes. you know what a coyote. these are not good people. they were sent up here with human traffickers because the democrats supported policies that allowed this to happen. democrats also refused to fund the personnel, the bed space, the resources that we need to house the minors. now, they want us to take care of the minors and that's fine. but they don't want to give us the money to take care of them, because the worse everything looks they think the better they're going to do with respect to the blue wave. i think we'll have a red wave, not a blue wave. they want us to take care of bed space and resources and personnel and take everybody and, you know, like, let's run

the most luxurious hotel in the world for everybody. but they don't want to give us the money. so you could ask them about that. we have to house these minors and we have to house them safely. and frankly we have to house them and we should be taking good care of them and then we should return them back home. that's what we have to do. but every time we ask for resources, the democrats say no. they say no to everything. they're obstructionists because they think that's good politically. i think that's bad politically. for them i think it's bad politically. we'll see. in addition, democrat and court order loopholes prevent family detention and lead to family separation. no matter how you cut it. i signed a very good executive order yesterday, but that's only limited. no matter how you cut it, it leads to separation ultimately. i'm directly h.h.s., d.h.s., d.o.j. to work together to keep

illegal immigrant families together during the immigration process and to reunite these previously separated groups. but the only real solution is for congress to close the catch-and-release loopholes that have fueled the child smuggling industry. the democrats are causing tremendous damage and destruction and lives by not doing something about this. and they know that. they know that better than anybody up there with a pen. if we don't close these loopholes, there's no amount of money or personnel in the world to address the crisis. a very serious crisis. this isn't trump administration. you look back at 2014 during the obama administration. they have pictures that were so bad. they had a judge that said it was inhumane the way they were treating children. take a look at some of the court rulings against the obama administration. they talked about inhumane

treatment. i looked at them, read them. they were all over the place. inhumane treatment. they were treating them terribly. we have a situation where some of these places they're really running them well. i give a lot of credit to secretary nielsen and all of the people that have worked this. it's the nicest people have seen but it's still something that shouldn't be taking place. my wife, our first lady is down now at the border because it really bothered her to be looking at this and seeing it as it bothered me, as it bothered everybody at this table. we're all bothered by it. but we need two to tango. we have 51 votes in the senate. we need 60, unfortunately, because we have the ridiculous filibuster rule. so we need 60. and i think i'll get four or five or six from senators, frankly, running in states where i won by 25, 30, 40 points with

mike, and i think we'll get six senators. maybe we'll get seven senators. that still doesn't get us to 60, so there's nothing we can do to get there and people don't understand that. when we have a majority in the senate, we have a majority by one, but we need 10 votes. so we need 10 essentially -- we need 10 democrats. not going to get them. they're told by schumer and pelosi, don't do it. because we want to see if we can pick up seats. they don't care about the children. they don't care about the injury. they don't care about the problems. they don't care about anything. all they do is say obstruct and let's see how we do because we have no policies that are any good. they're not good politicians. they have nothing going. all they're good is obstructing and they generally stick together. i respect them for that. that's about it. their policies stink. they're no good. they have no ideas. they have no nothing, the democrats. all they can do is obstruct and

vote together and vote against and make it impossible to take care of children, families, and to take care of immigration. we should be able to make an immigration bill that can really solve the problem. not just this. this is one aspect of it. this is one very important but small aspect of it. we should be able to do a bill. i'd invite them to come over to the white house anytime they want. this afternoon would be good. after the cabinet meeting would be good. they are invited, officially. i'll let you do the inviting. let the press do the inviting. but we have to do something about immigration in this country. for 50 years and long before that it was a disaster. but over the last 20, 25 years, it's gotten worse. every time they write a rule or regulation it makes it worse, not better. we have to solve this problem. we have to hire thousands of judges. no country in the world is hiring judges like that. they hire border people but you can't come into the country. mexico, by the way, is doing nothing for us.

nothing. they have the strongest immigration laws. they can do whatever they want. they can keep people out of mexico. 2,000-mile journey up mexico. they walk through mexico like it's walking through central park. it's ridiculous. mexico does nothing for us. so when people say, why are you being so tough with nafta -- and i am being tough because it's a terrible deal for the united states. mexico's making $100 billion a year off us and the horrible nafta deal. and i am being tough. one of the reasons i'm being tough, because they do nothing for us at the border. they encourage people, frankly, to walk through mexico and go into the united states. because they're drug traffickers. they're human traffickers. they're coyotes. i mean, we're getting some real beauties. mexico is doing nothing for us except taking our money and sending us drugs. they're doing nothing. they can solve this problem in

two minutes. you wouldn't even have to do anything. but they don't do it. they talk a good game but they don't do it. so we'll see how that all comes out. it will be very interesting to see. so with that i'll end by saying, we had a tremendous success in north korea. we continue to work on that. mike pompeo has been fantastic. john bolton working together with mike has been fantastic. i don't even know where -- there he is. i thought he might have gone back to north korea. he spent so much time in north korea, surprised to see you here. i think i can speak for both of us in saying, it's been an incredible experience. the relationship is very good. they've stopped the sending of missiles, including ballistic missiles. they're destroying their engine site. they're blowing it up. they already blown up one of their big test sites. in fact, it was actually four of their big test sites.

and the big thing is it will be a total denuclearization which is already taking to take place. i understand, mike, they already sent back or in the process of sending back the remains of our great heroes who died in north korea during the war. and that's already in the process of coming back. plus, as you all know very well, we got back our hostages, our three hostages who are right now living very happily with their families. and we're very happy about that. so we made tremendous progress with respect to north korea. even since i last spoke to you, what we agreed to do is have a meeting. i know some of the media says, oh, they agreed to meet. anybody would have agreed to meet. it would not have been possible for past administrations to have met in the way that we met. this was an incredible, important meeting. all over asia, they're in love with the united states because of what we've done. and japan, i spoke to prime

minister abe, and he's so thrilled. he doesn't have rockets going over japan. that makes him very happy, general. you know that. he's very thrilled not to see rockets going over japan. there were plenty of them sent right over japan. he said, i want to thank you, because what you've done is incredible. there are no more rockets going and there's no thought of that. things can change. i said it last night in a speech. things can change. personalities can change. maybe you end up with conflict. maybe you don't. but the relationship that mike has and i have with chairman kim and his group is a very good one, very strong one, and i think it's going to lead to tremendous success. but the document we signed, if people actually read it to the public you'd see, number one statement, we'll immediately begin total denuclearization of north korea. nobody thought that would be possible. if you remember a year and a half ago when mike and i came into office and when this group came into office, everybody was

talking about there's going to be a war. going to be a war with north korea. during the obama years, that's all i heard, we will have war with north korea. you have thousands of massive -- they call them cannons. that's what they are. they are bigger than howitzers and they are all aimed at seoul. seoul has 28 million people. it would not a catastrophe of 100,000 people or 200,000, like i read. this could have been a catastrophe of 30 million, 40 million people. i think we're very close having that situation solved. we had some very good news, even over the last couple days. they want to get it done. we want to get it done. we're moving quickly. north korea has been an incredible experience for me. we are going to help them, also, get back on track. we think it has tremendous potential.

chairman kim thinks it has tremendous potential. i want to also thank, as you know, prime minister abe. i want to thank president moon from south korea. he's been terrific. he's been really moving it along and pushing as hard as they can. but without the united states, it had no chance whatsoever. i also want to thank president xi of china because the border was very strong during a very critical period. unfortunately, the border's getting a little bit weaker now but that's ok. that's ok. but we have to get him to keep it tough. but i do want to thank president xi of china. so with all of that, we're having tremendous numbers, tremendous economic success. i think we're having the most successful period of time economically, perhaps, in our country's history. g.d.p. numbers have been great, but the ones that are coming out i'm really looking forward to seeing them.

i think you're going to see numbers -- i see the activity, i see the business. yesterday and last evening was really -- that was an incredible evening that we spent. that was to me just an incredible evening. a lot of you were there. i see a lot of the faces. a lot of you were there. at least 15,000 people couldn't get into the arena, and the arena was being held 9,000 people. sadly 15,000 people couldn't get into the arena, but it was a very special evening. people had a good time but they also heard a lot. i want to thank everybody very much. mick mulvaney is going to be giving a little report. you can give it in front of the media. would the media like to hear mick mulvaney's report or would you find it extraordinarily boring and therefore not fit for camera? i don't know. you like to hear it? and why don't we do this? we'll say grace afterwards, mike, and we'll do mick and then

we'll say grace. we don't have to necessarily do that in front of the cameras. ok. mick, go ahead. mr. mulvaney: i will find it hard not to make this boring, mr. president. president, a lot of folks have worked a long time, almost since you took over, to show you what -- to get you where you are today at this evening. i call this the drain the swamp cabinet meeting. i know we talked it during the campaign. you talked about it. today we're introducing the actual action that follow up on those words, to show people what we meant when we said drain the swamp. later after the press leaves, you'll hear from administrator mcmahon on the executive order dealing with civil service reform. what i want to talk about is the government reorganization. very, very briefly. when we got into this, one of the things we learned is it's been almost 100 years since anybody really reorganized the government at this type of scale. it's been since f.d.r. and his new deal when he changed how government works and we haven't

changed it since then. we're almost 20% into the 21st century but we're still dealing with a government that's from the early 19th century. this leads, mr. president, to some bizarre results. in fact, the stories, you don't know where to start. right now, because of the byzantine nature of the way we regulate in this country, if you have a cheese pizza, you make a cheese pizza, that's governed by the united states department of agriculture. the other way around. i always get this backwards. if you make a cheese pizza, it's administered by the food and drug administration. if you put a pepperoni on it it's governed by the usda. if you get a chicken, it's administered by the usda. if you get an egg, it's by the f.d.a. if you have an open faced roast beef sandwich, you put the bread on top of it, it's another one. hotdog, the meat is governed by

one. you put it in bread, it's governed by another. my favorite, if you have a saltwater fish, salmon, it's governed by the department of commerce. up river it's commerce. and to get the fish, it's governed by the u.s. army corps of engineers. this is stupid. this makes no sense. president trump: that was incredible. i think you should put that on television. mr. mulvaney: and linda's job, dealing with small businesses. long time ago i worked in a freezer for a guy that made frozen pizzas. one day he's making cheese pizzas and the afternoon he will make pepperoni. he has an entirely different agency to deal with. it simply doesn't make sense. we will try to fix it. i want to go through a couple of examples today. step aside to go over just one or two -- a couple of them made the press.

we talk about this later about the department of education and the department of labor being merged. we think that makes tremendous sense. what are they both doing? they're doing the same thing, get people ready for the work force. sometimes it's education, vocational training. we're doing the same thing. this goes back to the work i think ivanka i think did very early on job training when we learned we had -- in fact, we don't even know how many job training programs we have. some people think it's 40. some people think it's 46, 47. we get it down to 16 and put it all in one place so that if you're not happy or the next president is not happy the way it's going -- right now it's 16 different people around this table have work force training programs in their agency. if something is going wrong, you're going to come to me and say, mick, why aren't you doing that? i say, no, that's scott pruitt's fault or betsy devos' fault. we're putting ed and labor together.

examples how we think we can improve things. everybody, democrats, republicans, local government, state government, you, me, from the private sector -- i have horror stories about the army corps of engineers. over the course of the last century, their role has continued to creep and creep and creep. we can do better. so the proposal today you'll see makes important change to the corps of engineers. the stuff is really defense and there are still -- army corps does that's defense. they stay there. and they should. the things the army corps doesn't help to defend the nation will stay where they belong which is at the department of defense. environment, what they do deals with the environment, they deal with environmental mitigation, so forth, that goes over to the department of the interior. y'all are really good at that. similarly, ports, deep water ports, our lock system, that's not -- it used to be a military thing 100 years ago.

now it's department of transportation because it's a transportation item. we think it's a much more efficient layout. it ties in what you talked about. streamline our permitting process and goes along with what mr. zinke is doing at the d.o.i. to try to centralize so there's one point of contact. you want a permit, go to one federal agency. down here, we talked about that one food safety thing. right now it's f.d.a., usda, couple of places. we move all that into the usda. why? because they are really good at it. it's not to say f.d.a. isn't. wouldn't it be good for people to go to one area? in all fairness, secretary purdue will tell you, there's things usda does that others can't do well. housing component, why shouldn't we go to housing and urban development? we propose to move it to h.u.d. they handled the food stamps, snap program, that makes no sense at all.

h.h.s. is uniquely handled. we move that to h.h.s. have it centralized so we can deal with it. no one has ever tried at this scale, mr. president. president clinton tried it a little bit. a couple of us tried it. no one has done it at this scale. importantly, no one's ever followed through on it. no one's ever given the time commitment these people around the table they have given. no one has -- the stuff president clinton came up are peanuts compared to this. every time someone comes to me and says, this will doesn't have a chance. a couple different things. one of the biggest ideas, department of education and labor mergers actually doesn't get involved in jurisdictional battles on the hill. one committee on the hill handles those things now. congress is ahead of us which is difficult to say. there is a chance we can get

that done. even if we don't get it done now. this is the general rational kind of stuff that i think you asked us to do when you came to office. when ronald reagan said government wasn't the solution, it was the problem, it took 15 years after that for bill clinton to go on tv and say the age of big government is dead. this is a generational thing. this is going to happen overnight? no. some of the stuff we can do by ourselves on a regulatory fashion through the administrative process. other stuff will take longer. this is the stuff that's worth fighting for and won't get done unless somebody takes the first steps which is what we're doing today. thanks for -- thanks not only for giving us time to do this but the encouragement to do this. it helped to go back and say, look, push harder. push harder. this is important to the president. this is what he said drain the swamp and show people that voted for you and even people that didn't vote for you that you care about good government and we are going to make things a lot better. that's all i got. president trump: thank you very much. i think really tariff actually.

i want you to write down that one little -- i think that's really good actually. i want you to write that one down. i want to ask the secretary of state, who has been incredible, mike pompeo, who will give us an update on north korea. so important. mr. pompeo: since june 12 now, a week and a day, we made significant progress. importantly, not only are allies must directly affected by the japanese, chinese, broader circle. i talked to the brits, australians, talked with other europeans, each of them understands that we have fundamentally set a course that has the opportunity to change humanity. and they are all on board. they are all working, supportive of our theory of continuing the sanctions until we're complete. and so we have got a unified world to join chairman kim. i was there. i was there when he said it. he made a personal commitment. he has his reputation on the line. same way we do.

that says we are going to create a brighter future for north korea and denuclearize just as quickly as we can achieve that. i'm working hard, mr. president. i am sure there will be bumps along the way. i'm confident that we can get the world to unite behind this incredibly important mission. president trump: you did a hell of a job, i tell you. he's been in a lot of -- he's logged a lot of hours in airplanes going over 22, 23-hour flight. spent a lot of time. we're very proud of you. thank you very much, mike. thank you all, very much. [talking at the same time] reporter: [inaudible] president trump: the got to get together. what is my message to lawmakers have to due with immigration? they have got to do something.

they have to sit down. i'll be certainly -- i'm willing to do it. i just told you i'll invite senator schumer and nancy pelosi. they can come over. they can bring whoever they want. but the lawmakers have to sit down and they have to do something because our country cannot continue to run like this. we can't have open borders. you have to have borders. you don't have a country without borders. they have to be enforced. it has to be a strict enforcement. at the same time we want people to come into our country. we need them. we have many companies right now moving back into the united states. they need workers. we have 3.8% unemployment. they need workers. we have to have them come in. i'm saying, i want people to come in. they have to come in through a merit system, but we can have a lot of people come into our country through the merit system so they can help these companies that are looking so hard for people to make the company work.

but the -- in a very, very simple way congress has to get together, get their act together, democrats and republicans, they have to come up with a solution. i have ideas. they have ideas. we can put them together very easily. there's so much hatred. there's so much -- i mean, honestly -- there's a lot of false reporting. a lot of misreporting. there's also a lot of great reporting. but congress has to come together and this is the best time to do it. right now i think is the best time i've seen for people that really are well-meaning. unfortunately, we have an election coming up in a few months. i guess they're looking at it and we're looking at it and maybe we have to just sort of put on the blinders when it comes to doing that. but congress has to get together and we have to do something on immigration. it's very important. we have to change almost everything that's been done in the past. it's ridiculous. we are being laughed at as a country because of our bad immigration policies.

you know, we're a young administration. this has been begun on for 50 years, 60 years, 70 years, but it's gotten worse over the last 20 because laws have been so complex and so ridiculous. we really don't have a law. we have laws that don't allow you to do what you're supposed to be doing. we also want to keep it in a very humane way. we want to take care of people. if we don't take them in we have to help. we also need help from mexico. mexico has not help us and we need help from mexico. so it's a long answer. but i also appreciate the great job you've done. reporter: [inaudible] president trump: i can't hear you. we want to put them together. we don't want to have people, we don't want to have children separated from their parents. you have to understand, you gave an example yesterday of 12,000 children.

of the 12,000, 10,000 came up either alone. they weren't necessarily young children. either alone or came up with traffickers and coyotes. and these coyotes are bad dudes, but they came up with other people, brought them up, and they are using these children. that's 10,000 out of the 12,000. of the 2,000, a lot of the people when they came with their children, this is their third, fourth, fifth time trying to come into our country. so this is not a perfect situation. this is very bad. now, port of entry, if you go to if you go to a port of entry. it works out very nicely. they don't want to go through the port of entry. many of the people in the 2000 category, 2,000 children they have tried to come into our country many times the same way and don't want to go through our port of entry and usually that is a bad reason. why don't they want to go in

legally. so you have a situation that is ripe for congress to get together and come up with a solution. and i am ready, willing and able to help and ready, willing and able to take this pen right here and sign very quickly. reporter: [inaudible] president trump: if we took zero tolerance away, you would be overrun. you would have millions of people coming through our border. everybody would come right now and getting their little belongings unfortunately and would be heading up. you would have a run in this country the likes of nobody has ever seen. so we have to have strong borders. frankly, the wall in terms of drugs, in terms of keeping certain people out that we don't

want in this country, the wall is imperative. we have to have the wall. we started the wall, $1.6 billion and fixing tremendous amounts of wall that has been jeefer run. but we have to come with a solution. i would consider it whether it's north korea or so many other things. look, i have been given a very tough hand because i came up here, we had an economy that was going down, we had an iran problem, a middle east problem. take a look at what was going on in the middle east. a lot smoother right now than anything you have heard over the last eight years. we were given a lot of bad cards. one of the bad cards we were given this immigration mess and made worse by all of the different contradicted laws that have been passed. so we are going to work very hard with mike pence and everybody else in this room to

see if we can solve the immigration problem. but we need democrats. if they are going to obstruct, it can't be done because the republicans don't have the votes. i think we will win additional senate seats. that will help us a lot. unless we keep the house more or less like it is right now -- unless the democrats are serious and want to come along and get immigration work done. we can do something that's going to be historic. we can do something that can be historic and can get it done. i'm ready and i'm here. these are very talented people. we are all here. we need votes from the democrats or else can pass. thank you very much. >> thank you all.

thank you. pres. trump: thank you. this week on newsmakers, senate judiciary committee chair chuck grassley is asked about the possibility of former fbi director james comey testifying before his committee. >> there was a big inspector general report hearing before your committee. it is with some displeasure james comey did not show up. he had time for media appearances but not congress. are you going to ask him or perhaps subpoena him to respond to these findings? to subpoena him, but in the senate rules of our committee, you have to have both senator feinstein and i agree. i cannot tell you she would agree to it. >> and loretta lynch as well? >> yes.

>> went to you think a decision would be made? >> it senator feinstein tells me, yesterday. for as that also go compulsory process for andrew mccabe? >> that involves a few steps. first of all, feinstein and me agreeing to it. i want to do that and we are in negotiations with her. then he goes to the justice department to see that it does not interfere with any of their potential prosecution. and then getting the for us, i think another step that is not so regular is i think we need to -- and we are working through his lawyers on this -- to have a conversation of what he can contribute to our oversight, because if he can't contribute anything substantial, there is no point in going through it. christ provided that

conversation results in a positive outcome, you would be recommending immunity? ? yes -- >> yes. announcer: newsmakers on c-span. "washington journal," live every day with policy issues that impact you. friday morning, members of congress will discuss congressional efforts to reform immigration policy. a new jersey congressman and vermont congressman will share their views. be sure to watch c-span's washington journal live at seven eastern friday morning. join the discussion. >> on thursday, the first lady and health and human services secretary alec cesar visited -- alex