Photo: Alamy
President Donald Trump said during a Sunday interview that he will not lift his emergency order on the southern border.
The president shared the comments during an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
“We have an emergency. We have a massive emergency overall. It’s an overall emergency on immigration. And the — if the courts don’t allow us to take people out, if we had to have a court case every single — think of it,” he said.
“Every single person, we have millions of people. If you have millions of court cases, figure two weeks a court case, it would be 300 years,” the president added.
Trump also argued that the greatest threat to the U.S. now are the courts seeking to block his deportation efforts.
“The border now is not the emergency. The border is — it’s all part of the same thing though. The big emergency right now is that we have thousands of people that we want to take out, and we have some judges that want everybody to go to court,” he said.
The president argued that he is relying on U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi to handle the legal battle concerning deportations, including the case of Abrego Garcia, an illegal immigrant sent to El Salvador that Democrats argue was wrongly deported.
“I’m relying on the attorney general of the United States, Pam Bondi, who’s very capable, doing a great job. Because I’m not involved in the legality or the illegality. I have lawyers to do that and that’s why I have a great DOJ. We have a great one,” Trump said.
“We had a very corrupt one before,” he added. “Now we have a great one. And they’re not viewing the decision the way you said it. They don’t view it that way at all. They think it’s a totally different decision.”
The president initially declared an emergency at the southern border in January due to the high number of illegal immigrants crossing into the U.S. The order “directs the Secretary of Defense to deploy additional personnel to the border, including members of the Armed Forces and the National Guard.”
The order also “directs the Secretaries of Defense and Homeland Security to finish the wall along the southern border and ensures that DHS has all the flexibility it needs to operate air missions near the border.”