At 9:00 p.m. Tuesday, the president delivered his much anticipated speech from the Oval Office about the illegal immigration crisis at the southern border of the United States.

A few minutes later, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, both of whom favor open borders to keep future Democrat voters flowing into the country, answered him.

Trump discussed facts and data about illegal aliens and the drugs and crime they cause.

Pelosi and Schumer blamed Trump for the government shutdown that began after they refused to fund a wall for border security.

Trump won. They lost.

Trump’s Plea

The president did not declare the border a national emergency, as many thought he would. Instead, he calmly enumerated the facts about the illegal-alien invasion.

“Every day, customs and border patrol agents encounter thousands of illegal immigrants trying to enter our country,” he accurately said. “We are out of space to hold them, and we have no way to promptly return them back home to their country.”

Illegal immigration, he said, is bad for American blacks and American Hispanics job-wise. But beyond that, “Our southern border is a pipeline for vast quantities of illegal drugs, including meth, heroin, cocaine, and fentanyl. Every week, 300 of our citizens are killed by heroin alone, 90 percent of which floods across from our southern border. More Americans will die from drugs this year than were killed in the entire Vietnam War.”

Trump detailed the data on border arrests: “In the last two years, ICE officers made 266,000 arrests of aliens with criminal records, including those charged with or convicted of 100,000 assaults, 30,000 sex crimes, and 4,000 violent killings. Over the years, thousands of Americans have been brutally killed by those who illegally entered our country.”

And “last month, 20,000 migrant children were illegally brought into the united States.” Ruthless smugglers use them as pawns, and 33 percent of illegal-alien women are sexually assaulted on their way to the border.

Trump noted the obvious: “This barrier is absolutely critical to border security. It’s also what our professionals at the border want and need. This is just common sense. The border wall would very quickly pay for itself. The cost of illegal drugs exceeds $500 billion a year — vastly more than the $5.7 billion we have requested from Congress.”

And if walls don’t work, he asked, “why do wealthy politicians build walls, fences and gates around their homes? They don't build walls because they hate the people on the outside, but because they love the people on the inside.”

Last, Trump discussed illegal-alien murderers, including the twice-deported illegal, protected by California’s sanctuary law, who murdered a good cop, police allege, the day after Christmas.

Then he offered up a list of the crimes committed by the savages who sneak across the border: the illegal alien in California who raped and beat to death an Air Force veteran with a hammer, the illegal alien who beheaded and dismembered someone in Georgia, the MS-13 gang members, “unaccompanied minors” when they cross the border, who stabbed and beat a 16-year-old girl in Maryland.

“So sad,” the president said. “So terrible.”

Pelosi and Schumer Bellyache

The two open-borders Democrats didn’t argue facts.

They didn’t mention the Americans who lose jobs to border-jumping illegals. They didn’t mention the Americans who lose their lives to the sanctuary policies their state and local party cohort endorses. They didn’t mention the drugs.

They complained that Trump wouldn’t sign leftist legislation to keep the borders open and fund pet projects. Lied Pelosi, “The fact is: President Trump has chosen to hold hostage critical services for the health, safety and well-being of the American people and withhold the paychecks of 800,000 innocent workers across the nation — many of them veterans. He promised to keep government shutdown for ‘months or years’ — no matter whom it hurts. That’s just plain wrong.”

“Women and children at the border are not a security threat,” she misleadingly said, without divulging the truth that most illegals are single young men.

Leftist Schumer was up next. He also called a border wall “ineffective” and “unnecessary,” and accused Trump of causing the shutdown.

“We don’t govern by temper tantrum,” the man who can’t explain Israel’s border wall said. “No president should pound the table and demand he gets his way or else the government shuts down, hurting millions of Americans who are treated as leverage.”

Then Schumer lied. “Tonight,” the open-borders Democrat said, “President Trump has appealed to fear, not facts.” Trump offered many facts. They offered none.

And then Schumer took up the cause of the put-upon federal bureaucrat. “Federal workers are about to miss a paycheck. Some families can’t get a mortgage to buy a new home.”

A lot of Americans miss paychecks when illegal aliens take jobs, but at any rate Schumer accused Trump of “manufacturing a crisis,” and begged him to “re-open the government and continue to work through disagreements about policy. We can secure our border without an expensive, ineffective wall. And we can welcome legal immigrants and refugees without compromising safety and security.”

The president didn’t discuss legal immigrants and real refugees. At all.

Trump won. They lost.

Photo of President Trump: Screen-grab from White House video of his speech