President Donald Trump, when asked if he has an obligation to uphold the Constitution as president, said, “I don’t know.”
Trump made the disturbing comment during an interview with Kristen Welker on NBC’s Meet the Press while discussing his campaign promise to deport millions of immigrants. Trump, who himself is free because he exploited his own due process rights, has denied those same rights to immigrants he sent without trial to an infamous mega-prison in El Salvador.
“Your Secretary of State says everyone who’s here, citizens and non-citizens, deserve due process. Do you agree, Mr. President?” Welker asked Trump.
“I don’t know. I’m not, I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know,” he said.
It’s a terrifying answer from a president who, like other presidents before him, swore while taking the oath of office to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
When Welker pressed Trump, pointing out that the Fifth Amendment entitles everyone in the U.S. to due process, he again said, “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 two million or three million trials,” Trump continued. “We have thousands of people that are some murderers and some drug dealers and some of the worst people on Earth.”
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The Fifth Amendment states that “no person shall… be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” making no distinction between citizens and non-citizens.
Welker then asked Trump whether he needs to “uphold the Constitution of the United States as president.”
“I don’t know,” Trump said, adding that his lawyers “are going to obviously follow what the Supreme Court said.”
But, he added, “What you said is not what I heard the Supreme Court said. They have a different interpretation.”
The Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Trump must bring back Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man that Trump’s own lawyers have admitted was accidentally deported to El Salvador. Abrego Garcia’s deportation was a violation of an earlier “protection from removal” order by a judge that should have prevented him from being sent out of the U.S.
The court late last month also temporarily blocked Trump from deporting another group of Venezuelan immigrants using the Alien Enemies Act without first granting them an opportunity to contest their deportation.
While Trump has whined that “communist, radical-left judges” are impeding his deportations, despite the fact that he nominated three sitting Supreme Court justices. Even a Trump-appointed federal district judge ruled that his use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport undocumented immigrants and deny them due process is unlawful.
“The President cannot summarily declare that a foreign nation or government has threatened or perpetrated an invasion or predatory incursion of the United States, followed by the identification of the alien enemies subject to detention or removal,” District Court Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr. wrote in a ruling on Thursday.
But in the interview Trump insisted that he has an electoral mandate to deport undocumented immigrants.
“I was elected to get them the hell out of here and the courts are holding me from doing it,” he said.
In a recent NewsNation-DDHQ poll, a slim majority of respondents (51 percent) said that immigrants without legal status are entitled to a hearing a due process before being deported.
From Rolling Stone US
