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Mr. Trump continued to inflate figures about crime and drugs.

The essence of Mr. Trump’s pitch for a border wall — that a porous border had led to a crime and drug epidemic — remained unchanged.

Last year, he said, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement “removed 10,000 known or suspected gang members like MS-13 and members as bad as them.” (This is exaggerated; the agency reported it had removed 5,872 “known or suspected” gang members in the 2018 fiscal year.)

In addition, Mr. Trump repeated the statistic that in the past two years, ICE “arrested a total of 266,000 criminal aliens inside of the United States, including those charged or convicted of nearly 100,000 assaults, 30,000 sex crimes and 4,000 homicides or, as you would call them, violent, vicious killings.” The figures include both charges and convictions, and each arrest may represent multiple offenses. The most common charges were traffic violations and drug and immigration offenses.

“Drugs kill much more than 70,000 Americans a year and cost our society in excess of $700 billion,” the president said. The figures are accurate for overdose deaths and the economic costs of addiction. But a border wall would do little to prevent the 35 percent of overdose deaths involving prescription opioids or the $627.5 billion in costs incurred because of tobacco, alcohol and prescription drug addiction.

Still, the president pressed the case.

“I believe that crime in this country can go down by a massive percentage if we have great security on our southern border,” Mr. Trump said. “I believe drugs, large percentages of which come through the southern border, will be cut by a number that nobody will believe.”