President Trump will devote a big part of his Tuesday night speech to Congress to talk about immigration, an issue he ran on and one that continues to draw both praise and complaints as he tries to impose tough new border rules, and as he prepares to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.
“You will hear about his commitment to immigration and his desire for border security and what it means, not just about keeping the nation safe, but what impact it’s having on the economy,” White House spokesman Sean Spicer told reporters Monday. “You will hear a lot about immigration tomorrow night and he will talk about why it matters.”
Trump quickly signed a controversial executive order banning immigrants from seven countries whose governments are struggling to maintain order in the face of a jihadist threat. The order stopped short of the total ban on Muslim immigration that he proposed during the campaign, but Democrats and human rights lawyers argued that it was issued in bad faith in order to advance his previously-stated goal of restricting Muslim migration.
After a hasty period of litigation, federal appellate court upheld a temporary injunction of the ban, in part because of the rocky implementation of the order.
“The state has admitted that people abroad without prior U.S. contacts do not have rights that can be asserted by them and we agree,” August Flentje, the special counsel to the assistant U.S. attorney general, told a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals while defending the ban.
The judges countered, in their opinion, by noting that the order as-written applied to lawful permanent residents of the United States, even though White House Counsel Don McGahn and other administration officials had announced exemptions to the order within days of the initial announcement.
“The government has offered no authority establishing that the White House counsel is empowered to issue an amended order superseding the executive order signed by the president and now challenged by the States, and that proposition seems unlikely,” the Ninth Circuit Court panelists wrote. “Nor has the government established that the White House counsel’s interpretation of the executive order is binding on all executive branch officials responsible for enforcing the executive order. The White House counsel is not the president, and he is not known to be in the chain of command for any of the executive departments.”
Trump and his allies responded by announcing a plan to revise the order in a way that would codify the exemptions more formally. “The administration [should] take a look at this and not go back and press it to court, to go back and clean up the document and to be able to make it clear,” Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., said February 10.
Spicer said the administration plans to release a revised order this week, which will allow Trump to preface the publication with Tuesday night’s defense of his immigration policies. “The next order, I think, we should have it out probably the middle of this week,” Spicer said.
