President Donald Trump used his address to the United Nations General Assembly in New York City on Tuesday to draw a sharp line between American sovereignty and what he described as a globalist migration agenda, declaring that there is “no human right to illegal immigration,” according to Breitbart News.
Speaking before the assembled delegations, Trump paired that assertion with a full-throated rejection of the International Criminal Court, making clear the United States would “never allow U.S. service members or anyone else to be investigated or given show trials by an anti-American tribunal with no jurisdiction over us,” Breitbart reported.
A Call for Mass Withdrawal
The president did not stop at refusing cooperation. He urged other nations to leave what he called a “rogue institution” immediately, framing the court as a threat to national self-government rather than a neutral arbiter of international law.
Trump’s remarks signaled a broader posture toward multilateral bodies: engagement on American terms, with sovereignty as the non-negotiable baseline. That theme ran through the entire address, from security and legal jurisdiction to cultural and demographic questions.
Targeting the Human Rights Council
A substantial portion of the speech focused on the UN’s human rights apparatus, which Trump accused of selective outrage. He charged that the UN’s top human rights officials devote their time to criticizing the United States for protecting children from what he called “transgender mutilation and transgender insanity” and for enforcing its immigration laws, while ignoring atrocities committed against Christians around the world.
“It is equally unacceptable that, with all the genuine atrocities in the world, the UN’s top human rights officials spend their time criticizing the United States for protecting our children from transgender mutilation and transgender insanity, and enforcing our immigration laws – what they do is unbelievable,” Trump said, per Breitbart.
He labeled members of the Human Rights Council “craven hypocrites,” arguing they have “little to say about the persecution of Christians.” Trump described Christian persecution as a global and longstanding phenomenon that he said is “not even believable” in its scale, and he contrasted that silence with what he characterized as the Council’s focus on American domestic policy.
Immigration, Borders, and the Biden Era
From there, Trump turned to immigration, arguing that the same officials pressing the United States on human rights want the country to “open up our borders to gangs and criminals from world’s most dangerous places.”
“They want the worst people to come in from the worst places on earth, and we don’t do it anymore,” he said. He added a pointed reference to the prior administration’s border policies: “We did do it, but we don’t do that anymore.”
The line drew a direct contrast between current enforcement and what Trump described as the immigration policy — or absence of one — during President Biden’s tenure. It was one of several moments in which the president used the UN stage to litigate domestic political battles in front of an international audience.
UNESCO and Cultural Heritage
Trump also took aim at UNESCO, the UN’s cultural body, noting the irony he saw in an institution devoted to protecting cultural heritage simultaneously promoting mass migration.
“It is deeply ironic that the United Nations has an entire institution, the UNESCO group of people and countries, devoted to protecting cultural heritage. Yet, with their ceaseless promotion of mass migration, these globalists are actively destroying the greatest cultures and most extraordinary heritage in all of history,” he said, according to Breitbart.
That argument tied the migration debate to cultural preservation — a framing that recasts border enforcement not merely as a security measure but as a form of heritage protection. For Trump, the two are inseparable: a nation that cannot control who enters it, in his telling, cannot preserve what makes it distinct.
‘A Right to Remain a Sovereign Nation’
Trump closed the immigration section with a rhetorical hinge that captured his central claim of the day.
“There is no human right to illegal immigration, but there is a right to remain a sovereign nation, and we want to remain a sovereign nation, and so should you,” he said.
The formulation inverted the language typically used in international human rights forums, replacing the vocabulary of universal rights with the vocabulary of national self-determination. It also served as an implicit invitation to other governments: the United States, in Trump’s framing, is not an outlier but a model.
The Broader Message
Taken together, the address amounted to a comprehensive indictment of the UN system as Trump sees it — one that, in his account, polices American domestic policy while ignoring genuine abuses elsewhere, and that elevates migration as a universal good while eroding the nations it claims to serve.
The speech is likely to be received very differently depending on the audience. Supporters of the president’s immigration and sovereignty agenda will hear a long-overdue defense of national borders and a refusal to submit American citizens to international tribunals. Critics will hear a rejection of multilateral institutions and human rights mechanisms that have, for decades, been central to the post-war international order.
What is not in dispute is the starkness of the choice Trump presented to the assembled delegates. He did not ask for reform of the ICC; he asked nations to leave it. He did not ask the Human Rights Council to broaden its focus; he accused it of hypocrisy and dismissed its critiques of U.S. policy. And he did not frame immigration as a humanitarian question; he framed it as a question of whether sovereign nations retain the right to decide who enters.
The address, delivered at the annual gathering of world leaders, underscores how sharply the United States’ posture toward global institutions has shifted — and how central immigration and sovereignty have become to that shift. For Trump, the two issues are the same argument: a nation that cannot defend its borders and its children, he suggested, cannot claim to be sovereign at all.
Breitbart News reported on the address, including the president’s call for other countries to resign from the ICC “immediately” and his criticism of UN human rights officials for what he described as their fixation on the United States while atrocities against Christians go unaddressed.
Source: www.breitbart.com — https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2026/09/22/trump-to-u-n-general-assembly-there-is-no-human-right-to-illegal-immigration/