Trump renews pledge to build Mexico border wall during California visit

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U.S. President Donald Trump travelled to California on Tuesday to renew his pledge to build a wall with Mexico and crack down on lawmakers who seek to protect undocumented immigrants, escalating a political battle over immigration with the country’s largest and most left-leaning state.

Mr. Trump reiterated his promise to construct a wall with Mexico and to ask Congress to restrict federal funding to “sanctuary” cities during a visit to a San Diego border crossing, where he was given a tour of eight 30-foot wall prototypes that form part of his signature campaign pledge.

The wall “will be 99.5 per cent successful,” Mr. Trump said, adding that a border wall “will save hundreds of billions of dollars, many, many times what it’s going to cost.”

The one-day visit marked Mr. Trump’s first trip to California since the 2016 presidential primaries – making him the first president in more than 60 years to skip the country’s most populous state during his initial year in office. Along with touring the border wall prototypes, Mr. Trump was also set to attend a high-priced fundraiser and round table at a private residence in Beverly Hills organized by the Republican National Committee.

The Republican President’s visit comes as tensions between California and the White House have reached a fever pitch.

California, where two out of every three voters cast a ballot for Hillary Clinton, sees itself as the leader of the Trump resistance movement. State lawmakers have sued Mr. Trump’s administration 28 times in the past 14 months to oppose federal policies ranging from offshore drilling, to health-care, to debt relief for some student loans.

The state has also proposed a complex workaround to avoid the tax cuts passed by Congress that cap state and local deductions, and the two levels of government have sparred over marijuana policy.

California lawmakers have been keen to point out that the state’s openness to immigration and global trade are the antithesis of Mr. Trump’s protectionism and have helped fuel strong economic growth since the 2008 recession.

“I’m not sure why it took him so long [to visit], given that California leads the nation in so many different ways,” California Attorney-General Xavier Becerra said on Monday. “But at least he’s coming and when he comes ... he’ll find that California has become number one in manufacturing, in agriculture, in high technology, in hospitality and entertainment, in graduating people from college.”

But of all the issues the two governments have sparred over, it is immigration that has emerged as the flashpoint in the battle. Immigrants make up more than a quarter of California’s population and the state is home to more than 2.6 million undocumented immigrants.

Federal courts in California have stymied several of Mr. Trump’s other immigration policies, including his ban last year on travel to the U.S. from six Muslim countries and his pledge to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which gives immigrants brought to the U.S. illegally as children the right to live and work in the country.

California has also passed several immigrant-protection laws to become the first “sanctuary state.” This year it enacted the California Values Act, which severely limits the ability of local law enforcement agencies to share information with federal agents and co-operate with immigration investigations. The state has also passed legislation banning private businesses from voluntarily turning employee information over to federal immigration investigators, and requiring U.S. immigration detention centres open their doors to state inspectors.

Mr. Trump has responded to the state’s moves by threatening to pull all federal immigration and customs inspectors out of California. The Department of Homeland Security launched a series of immigration raids and audits across the state earlier this year and White House officials slammed Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf after she publicly warned of the impending immigration raids in her city.

During his visit to San Diego, Mr. Trump said California’s sanctuary laws create a safe haven for violent criminals and “threaten the safety and security of our nation.”

“The smugglers, the traffickers, the gang members, they’re all taking refuge and I think a lot of people in California understand that,” he said.

Last week, U.S. Attorney-General Jeff Sessions flew to the state capitol of Sacramento to accuse Ms. Schaaf of having a “radical open borders agenda” and to announce his Justice Department was suing California over its sanctuary-state legislation.

The Justice Department’s lawsuit accuses California of violating the Constitution by infringing on the federal government’s exclusive authority to set immigration policy.

California Governor Jerry Brown fired back last week, accusing Mr. Trump of “basically going to war against the state of California, the engine of the American economy,”

In a letter posted on Twitter, Mr. Brown urged Mr. Trump to skip the tour of the border wall prototypes and instead visit construction of infrastructure to support California’s planned high-speed rail corridor between Los Angeles and San Francisco. “Bridges are better than walls,” Mr. Brown said on Twitter Tuesday.

“’Governor Brown has done a very poor job running California,” Mr. Trump told journalists during a tour of the border wall. “They have the highest taxes in the United States. The place is totally out of control.”

Mr. Trump’s visit comes amid what is already shaping up to be a tumultuous week for the Republican President.

James Schwab, the San Francisco spokesman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement resigned Tuesday, claiming that Mr. Sessions and ICE Acting Director Thomas Homan had made “false” and “misleading” statements about immigration raids in California.

Just hours before arriving in California, Mr. Trump fired Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State, replacing him with CIA director Mike Pompeo, in part because the two disagreed over Mr. Tillerson’s support for continuing a landmark 2015 nuclear deal with Iran.

Mr. Trump singled out the Iran nuclear deal in a speech to military personnel at a marine air station in San Diego, saying he wanted to continue working with international allies to block Iran’s access to nuclear weapons. “Everywhere we go in the Middle East it’s Iran, Iran, Iran behind every problem,” Mr. Trump said.

He promised to continue pushing to expand U.S. defence spending, including more money for nuclear weapons, enhanced missile defence and new investments in the U.S. space program. “Space is a war-fighting domain, just like land, air and sea,” he said, adding he would consider creating a new armed forces called “Space Force.”