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Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Kevin McAleenan said Tuesday that his department needed more troops on the southern border, where he hoped to build on a "strong partnership" with the Department of Defense and continue to progress quickly on a barrier blocking unauthorized entries.
He told Fox News host Dana Perino at "The Daily Briefing" when she asked him how he planned, without additional congressional funding, to give voters the feeling that the administration was progressing in the construction of the border wall that the president had put in place. part of his 2016 campaign.
"We are going to show a lot of progress this year," he told Perino, noting that the construction of the wall had already surpassed the progress made in federal projects of similar size. "We have already built the financing for fiscal year 2017 in less than two years, which shows how aggressive we are in this regard."
He also stressed the support of the Department of Defense, which he said has "critically engaged" in border security and released the Border Patrol to focus on the main tasks of maintaining security. l & # 39; order.
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Earlier in the day, Trump had tweeted that the wall "was being built quickly". "The wall is building quickly! The economy is excellent! Our country is once again respected!" he said.
For most of his tenure, the president and congressional Democrats repeatedly clashed over the border wall. When the two sides failed to reach an agreement on the issue by the end of 2018, the government closed down and only reopened in parallel with Trump's decision to declare a national emergency in order to to accelerate the financing of the wall.
Trump has taken a multidimensional approach to immigration policy and has been confronted with legal challenges for many of his decisions. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court heard pleadings on its government's decision to ask questions about citizenship in the 2020 census – a move that Democrats said was illegal.
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During his interview with Perino, McAleenan reiterated the president's concern over the law on unaccompanied minors and migrant families at the border. He highlighted two particular changes he would like to see from Congress.
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"The two targeted changes we need most are the ability to hold families together through a fair and expeditious immigration process," he said.
"And secondly, the possibility of having unaccompanied children, who are drawn into the cycle of smuggling traffic from Central America, and who are able to repatriate them safely, together with the Central American government, "he said.
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