Quotables
Stephen Miller says Trump's new travel ban will be 'fundamentally' the same as his first travel ban
Fox News held an immigration town hall event in Jacksonville, Florida, on Tuesday night, and host Martha MacCallum started off by asking White House policy adviser Stephen Miller via satellite about President Trump's coming replacement executive order limiting immigration from seven majority-Muslim countries and refugees. "So how is it going to be different this time?" she asked. "Well, nothing was wrong with the first executive order, however there was a flawed judicial ruling that was erroneous," Miller said. "Because of the exigency of the situation," he added, "the president is going to be issuing a new executive action — based off of the judicial ruling, flawed though it may be — to protect our country and to keep our people safe, and that is going to be coming very soon."
The new order will be "responsive to the judicial ruling," including mostly "minor, technical differences," Miller said. "Fundamentally, you're still going to have the same basic policy outcome for the country, but you're going to be responsive to a lot of very technical issues what were brought up by the court, and those will be addressed." MacCallum pressed him a little bit on that. "I know you think the order was fine the way it was issued initially, but courts disagreed — in fact, 48 courts took issue with it, and that's why it's halted right now," she said. As an example, she asked if the order will justify singling out the seven majority-Muslim countries and not, say, Saudi Arabia or Russia. "We've had dozens and dozens of terrorism cases from these seven countries — case after case after case," Miller said, without elaborating.
MacCallum ended by noting that we'll see soon enough if those "technical" fixes will satisfy the pretty fundamental problems flagged by the federal judiciary. As Trump might put it: SEE YOU IN COURT.