Trump threatens to withhold funds from cities that take in irregular immigrants

U.S. President Donald Trump has defended issuing pardons for the 1,500 people convicted of the assault on the Capitol, with which they tried to keep the Republican in the White House on January 6, 2021. In an interview granted to Fox News, the first since his inauguration last Monday, Trump stated that “they were treated like the worst criminals in history. And you know what they were there for? They were protesting the vote, because they knew the election was rigged.” He also described the attacks that the assailants perpetrated against law enforcement as “minor incidents.”

“Most of them were absolutely innocent” and have “served a long term in jail, in horrible conditions,’ he maintained in the interview in the Oval Office. The case against them, he said, “is nothing more than a political stunt... not in all cases, but most of them are very patriotic.” Host Sean Hannity, a conservative media star who avoided posing remotely uncomfortable questions to the president and who consistently sided with the Republican’s views, was forced to add that “they shouldn’t be allowed to storm the Capitol.”

Trump also expressed interest in having his predecessor, Joe Biden, investigated. The Republican returned to the White House as the first U.S. president convicted of a felony, having been found guilty of falsifying accounting documents in connection with hush money payments to porn actress Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election. Over the last year and a half Trump also faced charges for his role in attempts to alter the outcome of the 2020 election, and for the unlawful handling of classified documents. In his remarks to Hannity, the new president seemed to hope his Democratic predecessor would be put through a similar experience.

“It’s really hard to say that they shouldn’t have to go through it all,” he argued. Biden preemptively pardoned his brothers and brothers-in-law in the final minutes of his presidency, when Trump and he were already on Capitol Hill for the handover ceremony. In December, the former president also pardoned his son Hunter, who had cases pending in court for tax evasion and unlawful possession of a firearm. According to Trump, Biden has set an “amazing” precedent. “And you know, the funny thing, maybe the sad thing is, he didn’t give himself a pardon,” the new U.S. president added, although Biden didn’t need to: the Supreme Court ruled last summer in one of the cases involving Trump that U.S. presidents enjoy immunity for acts they carry out in the exercise of their functions.

The conversation had been recorded hours before its broadcast, on the same day the Pentagon began to deploy 1,500 additional soldiers to the border with Mexico to collaborate in the deportation of irregular immigrants, erect barriers, and assist in “detection and monitoring efforts.” The measure is part of the administration’s steps to fulfill the executive orders that Trump signed just hours after his inauguration against irregular immigration, the main priority of his first days in the White House, and which include suspending the right to asylum and restricting the right to birthright citizenship.

And he promised more. Among his statements in the interview, he pointed to the possibility of withholding federal funds from cities that refuse to turn illegal immigrants over to federal authorities for deportation. “I may have to do that,” he observed.

“I believe the number is 21 million people” he said of irregular immigrants on U.S. soil, “and a large percentage of them are criminals from all over the world,” the Republican stated, repeating the false accusations he made time and again during his electoral campaign.

Trump also threatened to withhold funds to California to help recovery efforts following the catastrophic fires in Los Angeles unless the heavily Democratic state changes the way it manages its water resources. The Republican has falsely repeated over and over again, as he did in the interview, that measures to protect an endangered fish species in the northern part of the state are to blame for there being no water in hydrants when firefighters tried to use them. “I don’t think we should give California anything until they let water flow down” from the north to the south, he said.

Among the dozens of executive orders Trump signed Monday was a 75-day extension for short-form video platform TikTok, which a law passed in May and endorsed by the Supreme Court last weekend required the company put itself up for sale and divest from its Chinese owner, ByteDance, by January 19 or face a ban in the United States. The law was motivated by national security concerns: that the data of the 170 million TikTok users in the U.S. could end up in the hands of the Chinese government, and that Beijing could use the social network to disseminate propaganda content.

Trump downplayed those fears. “But you can say that about everything made in China,” he argued. “Is it that important for China to be spying on young people? On young kids watching crazy videos?”

During the interview, Hannity also asked Trump about the attack he suffered last July in Butler, Pennsylvania, where he was wounded in the ear during a rally when a shooter opened fire on him from a nearby building. The president has stated that God saved his life because he was destined to “make America great again” and rescue the country from the problems in which, according to him, the Democratic administration has plunged it.

Does he now have more faith in God?

“I think so... statistically I shouldn’t be here. If I hadn’t turned my head... I got off by millimeters,” Trump said.

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