Several local and state politicians are blasting President Trump’s executive order to build a border wall, with one lawmaker calling it “embarrassingly un-American.”
“Forcing police to freelance as border agents doesn’t make our communities safer, nor neither does wasting billions of American tax dollars to further divide our binational community with a border wall. This is embarrassingly un-American,” California State Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher said in a statement Wednesday.
The president’s proposal to build a border wall was one of his hallmark pledges during the campaign. In signing the executive order, Trump said: "When it comes to public safety, there is no place for politics."
Several other local leaders, however, expressed disdain of the plan on Twitter.
“I’ve long opposed … plans for a border wall because in San Diego, we see the border as an opportunity, not a threat,” U.S. Rep. Scott Peters, D-CA, tweeted on Wednesday.
Earlier in the day, San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer, a Republican, pledged on Twitter “our binational, economic and cultural ties have my full support.”
In a statement to NBC 7 later on, the mayor said “We already have a safe and secure border in San Diego built by the federal government.”
He went on to state: “Keeping trade moving in both directions safely and securely is important to San Diego’s economy and helps create local jobs.”
U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris, D-CA, called the order a "band-aid" on immigration reform.
Local lawmakers, such as U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa, who have expressed support of Trump in the past, have not tweeted or released statements on the border wall order, as of Wednesday afternoon.
