Donald Trump says he doesn’t know if he backs due process rights

Donald Trump has refused to affirm his intention to uphold due process rights laid out in the US constitution.

In a new interview, the US president also said he does not think military force will be needed to make Canada the “51st state” of the US, and played down the possibility he would look to run for a third term in the White House. The comments in a wide-ranging and combative interview with NBC’s Meet The Press came as the Republican president’s efforts to quickly enact his agenda faced sharper headwinds from the public as his second administration passed the 100-day mark, according to a recent poll by the Associated Press-NORC Centre for Public Affairs Research.

Mr Trump made clear he is not backing away from a to-do list that he insists the American electorate broadly supported when they elected him in November.

The interview with NBC’s Kristen Welker was taped on Friday at his Mar-a-Lago property in Florida and aired on Sunday.

Critics on the left have tried to make the case that Mr Trump is chipping away at due process in the US, most notably in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran man who was living in Maryland when he was mistakenly deported to El Salvador and imprisoned without communication.

Mr Trump says Mr Abrego Garcia is part of a violent transnational gang, and has sought to turn deportation into a test case for his campaign against illegal immigration, despite a Supreme Court order saying the administration must work to return Mr Abrego Garcia to the US.

Asked if US citizens and non-citizens deserve due process as laid out in the Fifth Amendment of the constitution, the president was noncommittal.

“I don’t know. I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know,” Mr Trump said when pressed by Welker.

The Fifth Amendment provides “due process of law”, meaning a person has certain rights when it comes to being prosecuted for a crime. The 14th Amendment says no state can “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws”.

Mr Trump said he has “brilliant lawyers … and they are going to obviously follow what the Supreme Court said”.

He said he was pushing to deport “some of the worst, most dangerous people on Earth” but courts are getting in his way.

“I was elected to get them the hell out of here, and the courts are holding me from doing it,” Mr Trump said.

Before his White House meeting on Tuesday with newly elected Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, Mr Trump is not backing away from rhetoric that has angered Canadians.