President-elect Donald Trump accepted the Patriot of the Year award Thursday at an event organized by Fox Nation.

The event — hosted by Fox News host Sean Hannity in Long Island, New York — also honored several others, including actor and evangelist Kirk Cameron; General Dick Cody, who used his own helicopter to deliver relief supplies to people after Hurricane Helene; and Jonathan Diller, the New York police officer killed during a traffic stop in Queens. Stephanie Diller, the official’s widow, received a standing ovation and thanked Trump for his support.

Fox News personalities — including Jesse Watters, Laura Ingraham and Jeanine Pirro — also appeared as guests or speakers.

Trump took the stage to accept the award. This was one of his few public appearances since his election victory against Vice President Kamala Harris.

After a live performance of Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA,” the president-elect’s signature entrance song, Trump reflected on his recent bid for the White House in a 10-minute speech, arguing that the country was already seeing the fruits of his victory .

Trump also proposed plans to change the way elections work. This included eliminating mail-in voting in favor of one-day voting and voter identification laws. He pointed to discussions he had with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum that followed his proposal to impose a 25 percent tariff on all imported goods from two of the U.S.’s top trading partners if they do not did more to combat illegal border crossings and drug trafficking.

For most of his speech, the president-elect discussed his plans to combat illegal immigration, again claiming that his first term in office had seen the lowest number of illegal immigration in U.S. history. While the number of Border Patrol migrant encounters between ports of entry on the southern border reached a low of 11,127 during Trump’s presidency in April 2017, this was not a historic low.

Newsweek emailed Trump’s transition team for comment.

Below is a transcript of Trump’s speech.

“Well, I want to thank everyone. That’s quite a group. I have so many friends sitting around here. There’s one – he called me early. He said, ‘Why are you going through this process? You know it’s him.’ will win.’ He is strong. I’ll tell you this right from the start.

“How about Sean? Sean is just great, you know? And he said everything I wanted to say. And what the hell, I can’t say it again. But he is a special guy. He was my friend.” I probably shouldn’t say “friend,” but he really is a friend of the country and I just want to thank Sean Hannity and his reviews are very good. too, This is very, very important. They have truly incredible people at all levels of Fox – a few I don’t like, but that’s okay. Shouldn’t I name them? I don’t think I should do that.

“But you know, we had an incredible – just spectacular choice. They thought it would be close, and it wasn’t close. We won the popular vote by millions upon millions of votes. We won all seven swing states. And we won the most votes a Republican candidate has ever received. And I think I can also say it was a Democratic candidate, but I won’t bother going into that. We just had a great day, a tremendous night, a tremendous span of 72 days. It actually started 72 days ago. No day off, no golf, nothing.

(A spectator shouts something.)

“Thank you, darling. I just worked. It was just work because we have a very important job to do. We must win and bring our country back. When you look at all the people streaming here.” Open borders. Who could want open borders? And when I heard that – I heard it three and a half years ago, we built 571 miles of wall, which is way more than I said election had a very bad result.

“Do you remember that evening? That wasn’t a pleasant evening. But we had a very bad result, a very unfair situation. We will fix things in this country, including elections. We have to get the elections. This one was too big to manipulate, you know. They tried. They just tried it. They said, “This is a slaughter.”

“And we will do things that have really been necessary for a long time. And we will deal with elections. We want to have paper ballots, one-day voting, voter IDs and proof of citizenship. A little thing. A Little things like evidence that – and we have a hard time because in California they just passed a law that says you can’t even ask a voter for a voter ID card, you’ve committed a crime.

“You have to Judge Jeanine – where is Judge Jeanine? – get them locked up. You should lock someone up. I don’t think so – she won’t. She won’t do it. She’ll do it.” say, “I won’t do that.” But we’ll fix it. We will fix the whole country.

“And the first thing we have to do is get the criminals out of our country. They let 21 million people into our country who came across open borders from many, many countries. They came from prisons. They came from psychiatric institutions, even insane asylums, and we have to get them out.

“And if you think about it, who would do something like that? Who would do something like that? Who would think that allowing countries from all over the world to do this is a good thing? Who would think it’s a good thing to allow countries from all over the world to do this?” Let people in from prisons and from all these different places – countries that have serious problems with crime. And they’re all coming out, in Venezuela they took their drug dealers, their criminals, from areas of the city where you couldn’t even go in, and they took them out and brought them into our country. They brought them into the United States of America, and we’re getting them out damn quick.

“And as you know, I was talking to Canada and Justin came right away because we were talking about 25 percent tariffs. This is just the beginning. That’s a damn nice audience. I like this one. This is a nice audience.”

(Members of the audience sing “51.”)

“That’s an interesting statement. Thank you. I appreciate all this pent up anger and love. This is all at once. It’s all at once.”

“But we’re going to do things that a lot of people have thought – we’re going to drill, baby, drill. We will lower your prices and we will lower the costs. You know, when we were campaigning.” A lot of people thought the biggest thing was the economy, and it probably is. But I never believed it was as important as immigration and the border and preventing an invasion of our country.

“And I recently, as you probably read, spoke to the president, the new president of Mexico, a very nice woman. And we had a very nice conversation. But she said, ‘Why are you doing this?’ Me?’ I said, “I’m just putting a lot of tariffs on because you’re allowing criminals to come into our country and we can’t allow that anymore.”

“It stopped. It has stopped. It was so fast. It has stopped. But we have great people. You know, Tom Homan – is he central casting, by the way, Tom Homan? Is he a central cast member? We will stop them, and We will stop them quickly.

“We shouldn’t have to do this, but we have no choice. But we will stop them. But I really always thought it was bigger than inflation. We will take care of inflation. We will take care of it.” of that by lowering energy prices, everything else.

“That’s what they did. They messed up our energy. We had cheap gas – how about $1.84? And they’ve gone back to the Trump plan – the real Trump plan – and that’s what we’ll shortly have in the world all lined up to go.

“But I just want to say we are going to lower the prices. We will make our country safe. We will stop people from robbing our stores and harming our people.”

“We will – and we will deal with governors, including Democratic governors. Because that’s – unfortunately, whether you like it or not, that’s where the crime lies. In virtually every case, it is in Democratic-run cities and states. So we’re going to stop it.

“We will work with the governors and mayors, even if they are Democrats, and we will get it done. And we will bring our country back, and it will be bigger, better and stronger than ever before.” And we will be proud of our country again.

“At the moment we are not so proud of our country. We will be very proud of our country again. It will be better than ever. It will be more successful than ever before. We will.” We are more respected around the world than ever before.

“In fact, they already do. I think more has happened in the last two weeks than in the last four years. And we’re not even there yet. We’re not even there yet.”

“So I just want to say thank you – this is a fantastic group of people. This is a fantastic turnout. And you, my friends – you are my friends. And we’re going to be friends for this country, and we’re going to do something that I’ve been talking about for eight years.

“We made it. We have created the most successful economy in our country’s history. We were doing so well. Our border had its lowest number ever. The lowest number of illegal immigrants ever coming to our border.”

“The famous diagram. Remember the chart I looked at to the right? best immigration, the lowest number of people in the history of our country – in the history of our country.

“I mean, this is what we have achieved and we will achieve it again, and very quickly. It will happen very quickly because we have no choice. But we’re going to do something I’ve been talking about for eight years.” We’re going to do it again. And we have to do it again.

“And that means: We will make America great again. Thank you everyone.”