In a pair of Sunday morning tweets sent while on the way to his Virginia golf course, President Donald Trump went on another anti-immigrant tirade, this time explicitly advocating for depriving undocumented migrants of due-process rights.
“When someone comes in, we must immediately, with no Judges or Court cases, bring them back from where they came,” he wrote. “Our system is a mockery to good immigration policy and Law and Order.”
We cannot allow all of these people to invade our Country. When somebody comes in, we must immediately, with no Judges or Court Cases, bring them back from where they came. Our system is a mockery to good immigration policy and Law and Order. Most children come without parents…
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 24, 2018
Trump followed up by posting another tweet reiterating his long-held belief that immigration should be “merit-based,” a coded term that almost always means white immigrants from developed areas.
….Our Immigration policy, laughed at all over the world, is very unfair to all of those people who have gone through the system legally and are waiting on line for years! Immigration must be based on merit – we need people who will help to Make America Great Again!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 24, 2018
Many Central and South American immigrants making the dangerous journey to the United States are fleeing extremely dangerous situations and plan to claim asylum. The president’s Sunday morning tweets suggesting that all immigrants, whether they are seeking asylum or not, should be immediately deported is a rejection of their right to do so.
That the Trump administration would bar immigrants from seeking asylum in the U.S. isn’t necessarily a surprise. Its position in Trump v. Hawaii, the Muslim Ban case, is that “aliens outside the United States seeking a visa or initial admission have no constitutional rights at all” with respect to entry into the United States.
Should the administration prevail in the lawsuit, a dangerous precedent will be set that would allow the president to green-light harsher actions towards immigrants. As ThinkProgress has previously reported, if the majority-Republican Supreme Court upholds the Muslim ban, lower courts are likely to read that as a signal that the nation’s highest court no longer wants them to heed immigrants’ rights
The barrage of tweets comes just days after Republicans yet again delayed a vote on a “compromised” immigration bill. After weeks of supporting a congressional response to immigration and family separation at the border, Trump told Republicans to not “waste their time” on immigration, leaving the majority party even more confused than they were before.
Meanwhile, thousands of children remain separated from their families, and it’s not at all clear when, if ever, they will be reunited.