President Donald Trump starkly laid out his ideal zero-tolerance immigration policy during a meeting with lawmakers Tuesday afternoon.
“[In] other countries, it’s called ‘I’m sorry, you can’t come in. You have to leave.’ [In] this one, we have judges … If they step on our land…we have judges. It’s insane,” he declared. The president decried U.S. laws as a “hodgepodge” as he met with lawmakers to craft a strategy to push through immigration legislation.
Trump has tweeted in recent days his position on illegal immigrants who enter the U.S. through non-ports-of-entry, and how said illegal immigrants should be immediately expelled from the U.S. homeland.
Hiring manythousands of judges, and going through a long and complicated legal process, is not the way to go – will always be disfunctional. People must simply be stopped at the Border and told they cannot come into the U.S. illegally. Children brought back to their country……
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 25, 2018
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders clarified that Trump does not necessarily believe in expelling illegal immigrants without due process, saying, “Thousands of illegal aliens are removed every month without seeing an immigration judge as a result of procedures in current law, including voluntary removal and expedited removal. Just because you don’t see a judge, doesn’t mean you aren’t receiving due process.”