US President Donald Trump made a startling admission on Sunday: he is unsure if he is bound by the law of the land as he pursues his mass deportation strategy by any means necessary
Trump was speaking in an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press, which aired Sunday.
Moderator Kristen Welker asked the president if noncitizens in the United States deserve due process — a standard the Supreme Court has upheld for decades.
“I don’t know,” Trump responded. “I’m not a lawyer.”
“Well, the Fifth Amendment says as much,” Welker retorted.
The president responded, saying that such restrictions would be an unwieldy burden on his administration as it seeks to deport millions of people over the next four years.
“I don’t know. It seems– it might say that, but if you’re talking about that, then we’d have to have a million or 2 million or 3 million trials,” Trump answered. “We have thousands of people that are some murderers and some drug dealers and some of the worst people on Earth.”
Welker then asked: “But even given those numbers that you’re talking about, don’t you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States as president?”
Trump then repeated a claim he’s made several times in the past few weeks: that his staff believe the Supreme Court took a different view when it voted 9-0 to order the White House to “facilitate” the return of a wrongfully deported man. The president, apparently following the lead of his own staff, has repeatedly claimed (falsely) that the Court actually ruled in his favor.
“I don’t know. I have to respond by saying, again, I have brilliant lawyers that work for me, and they are going to obviously follow what the Supreme Court said,” the president told NBC. “What you said is not what I heard the Supreme Court said.”
This is a breaking news report. More to follow…
