Donald Trump has not confirmed his intention to uphold due process rights as provided by the US Constitution.
In a recent interview, the US president also said he does not believe it will take military force to make Canada the “51st state” of the US, and downplayed the likelihood of his candidacy for a third term in the White House.
The comments came in a wide-ranging, aggressive interview on NBC's “Meet the Press” as the Republican president's efforts to quickly move forward with his agenda have run into intense public resistance as he enters his second presidency, according to a recent poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
Mr Trump has made clear he will not back down from his plan, which he says won broad support from the American electorate when he was elected in November.
The interview with NBC's Kristen Welker was recorded Friday at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida and aired Sunday.
Critics on the left have sought to demonstrate that Mr. Trump is undermining due process principles in the United States, particularly in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran who lived in Maryland but was wrongly deported to El Salvador and held incommunicado.
Mr. Trump has claimed that Mr. Abrego Garcia is a member of a violent transnational gang and is trying to use his deportation as a precedent in his campaign against illegal immigration, despite a Supreme Court ruling that the administration must work to return Mr. Abrego Garcia to the United States.
When asked whether U.S. citizens and non-citizens have the right to due process under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, the president declined to answer.
“I don't know. I'm not a lawyer. I don't know,” Mr. Trump said when pressed by Welker.
The Fifth Amendment guarantees “due process of law,” meaning that a person has certain rights when it comes to being sued. The Fourteenth Amendment states that no state shall “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
Mr Trump said he had “brilliant lawyers… and they will certainly follow the decisions of the Supreme Court.”
He stressed that he was pushing for the deportation of “some of the most dangerous and horrible people on Earth,” but that the courts were standing in his way.
“I was elected to get rid of them, but the courts are not helping,” he said.
Sourse: breakingnews.ie
