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WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said Friday that he "didn't need" to declare a national emergency to build a wall at the US–Mexico border, but was doing so because he wanted to do it "faster." Anticipating court battles to come, civil rights attorneys cheered him on, highlighting Trump's remarks as undercutting any future argument by the administration that there is, in fact, a national emergency. "Keep talking mr president," Omar Jadwat, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Immigrants Rights Project, tweeted.

Trump announced his decision to declare a national emergency in a Rose Garden speech Friday morning. In a call with reporters earlier in the day, acting Chief of Staff and Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney said the national emergency declaration by the president would give the administration access to $3.6 billion in military construction funds.

"I want to do it faster," Trump said Friday. "I can do the wall over a longer period of time. I didn't need to do this. I would rather do it much faster. I don't have to do it for the election. I have already done a lot of wall for the election 2020." The reaction from left-leaning lawyers and Trump's critics on Twitter was swift. "Y'all keep giving this man a microphone! Please and thank you," Kristine Kippins, director of policy at the Constitutional Accountability Center, tweeted.

Yeah, this argument will work well in court. 🙄 Y'all keep giving this man a microphone! Please and thank you. https://t.co/lhCrD1zc5O

George Conway, a conservative lawyer — and the husband of White House counselor Kellyanne Conway — who has been critical of the president, tweeted that Trump's comment "should be the first sentence of the first paragraph of every complaint filed this afternoon."

Former US attorney Joyce Vance tweeted that Trump's comments were a "gift to all the lawyers preparing to sue him." Elizabeth Goitein of the Brennan Center for Justice tweeted that they were "plaintiffs' Exhibit A." Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe tweeted, "Some emergency!" Adi Kamdar, a fellow at the Knight First Amendment Institute, tweeted, "The brief practically writes itself."

This quote should be the first sentence of the first paragraph of every complaint filed this afternoon. https://t.co/ClHQhpTaEe