President Donald Trump returned on Saturday night to the argument at the heart of his immigration policy, telling a packed midterm rally at the Guardian Centers in Perry, Georgia, that America should not be taking in armies of migrants from terror-infested countries — and the crowd cheered and laughed as he repeated the blunt words he has used for those countries since his first term.
Trump was attacking Senator Jon Ossoff, the Georgia Democrat he is campaigning to remove, accusing him of backing a bill to bring in "armies of migrants from terror-infested countries like Libya, Yemen, Haiti, Somalia." Then he asked the crowd: "Remember what I called them? Shithouse countries. Remember the heat I took from the Democrats?"
He retold the first-term meeting with Democratic senators the same way he has told it before: "Why do we always have to take people from shithouse countries? Why can't we take people from like, well, Norway, Sweden. Why not Denmark?"
The bill Trump pointed to, S. 4814, was introduced in the Senate in June by Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts and would require the homeland security secretary to designate Haiti for temporary protected status. Ossoff is one of its co-sponsors; Trump told the crowd Ossoff had "personally sponsored" it.
Trump also turned on Somali migrants, saying 98 percent of Somalis in the United States do not work and that "they steal so much, they all have a Mercedes-Benz," and he repeated his attack on Rep. Ilhan Omar, claiming she had "openly admitted to fraud." Omar denies wrongdoing.
Pointing abroad, Trump said France is "right now burning down because it opens its borders to people who hate it," adding: "Never let them come into your country. And that's what we do." He said his administration had achieved the most secure border in American history and that "in the past 17 months, zero illegal aliens have been admitted to the United States."
Trump ranged across his record as the speech went on, claiming the poverty rate had reached "the single best level in American history" — naming African-American, Hispanic-American, Native-American and Asian-American poverty as all at their best levels ever recorded — and claiming the murder rate was at "the lowest level it's been in 125 years."
The phrase dates to January 2018, when Trump was reported to have used it in a White House meeting on immigration — a report he disputed at the time before acknowledging the remark in a Pennsylvania speech in December 2025. Saturday's rally, held ten days before the November 3 midterms, backed Rep. Mike Collins's challenge to Ossoff and Rick Jackson's run for governor; country singer Jason Aldean introduced the president, who had landed earlier at Robins Air Force Base.
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