'Power grab': Senator sounds alarm on Trump's flurry of day one executive orders
Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA) warned Monday night that a series of executive orders on immigration issued in the first few hours of Donald Trump’s new presidency were a clear show of force as his second administration kicks off.
Padilla made the stark remarks during CNN’s extended coverage of Trump’s inauguration, where he sounded off specifically about the president opening the process to end birthright citizenship, and his action removing from service senior leaders at the Department of Justice whose job it was to oversee the nation’s immigration courts.
“It’s a power grab by the new President Trump and his administration,” Padilla told CNN host Erin Burnett. “They're going to try to bend the agencies, and the Department of Justice for that matter, to their will.”
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The California senator said Trump is returning to the White House “with an aggressive agenda” and added that he’s expecting him to sign orders “that are legally dubious, some that are outright unconstitutional.”
Burnett pointed out as an example the president’s promise to end birthright citizenship despite constitutional protections.
“Exactly, it's written into the Constitution, literally the 14th Amendment,” Padilla said. “He cannot unilaterally change that, but that's a conversation and the chaos he wants to create.”
Padilla later told viewers that while he, the Democratic Party and a majority of the general public agree that the country should prioritize the detention and deportation of violent criminals, he added that “that's not what Trump is talking about.”
“The largest deportation operation in our country's history will carry a lot of innocent people, a lot of people who are critical to the economy, to our communities and to our national security,” he said.
Watch the clip below or at this link.