President Donald Trump awarded U.S. service members with the newly established Mexican Border Defense Medal for their efforts to “safeguard our nation’s southern border.”
The event, which took place in the Oval Office, highlighted the administration’s push to secure the U.S.-Mexico border and honored 13 members of the military. Trump said the ceremony follows an executive order from his first day back in office this year that directed the military to “protect and defend their homeland.”
“Today, we’re here to honor our military men and women for their central role in the protection of our border, something that I campaigned very, very strongly on and they made me look really good,” Trump said. “They were unbelievable. They made us all look good.”
“We went from having millions of people pouring over our border to having none in the last eight months,” he continued.
Trump also criticized the Biden administration for surrendering the southern border to “criminals, drug cartels, human traffickers and child smugglers.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the medals are being bestowed to the members because “border security is national security.” He noted that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Border czar Tom Homan, and many others have worked together as “one team” with the same mission.
“Biden allowed an invasion of this country, tens of millions of people, drugs, gangs, violence, and the military jumped to it day one with our partners,” Hegseth said. “But ultimately, it was incredible Americans. There’s 13 up here with us today. They all represent about 2,000 people who served at the border so far.”
Homan said in all of his years working on border security, he has always seen undocumented immigrants in the border’s vicinity — until now. Under Trump’s leadership, he remarked, he did not see any undocumented immigrants on a recent drive along the border.
“No one has done more than President Trump. What he has done is give us the most secure border in the history of this nation,” Homan said.
In August, Hegseth established the Mexican Border Defense Medal to recognize the service members at the southern border. It is identical to a medal awarded in 1918 for troops that served along the border.
According to the White House, more than 2.5 million undocumented immigrants have been removed from the United States and illegal border crossings have dropped to the lowest level since 1970. The White House also noted that the number of Americans dying from drugs has dropped since Trump took office because the flow of fentanyl is being stopped.
The president, during his remarks Monday, said he would be signing an executive order formally classifying fentanyl as a “weapon of mass destruction.”
“No bomb does what this is doing,” he said. “200 to 300 thousand people die every year that we know of.”
