Senior adviser and a hardline voice on immigration also said 200 miles of border wall will have been built by September 2020

Donald Trump will veto any congressional resolution against his declaration of a national emergency, a senior White House adviser indicated on Sunday.

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Stephen Miller, a hardline and influential voice on immigration policy, also claimed the administration will have built 200 miles of border wall by September 2020, two months before the next presidential election.

Speaking to Fox News Sunday, Miller defended Trump’s controversial decision to declare a national emergency in order to secure funds to build a wall on the US-Mexico border, despite the president’s own startling admission on Friday that the situation is not an emergency and that his use of emergency powers is unlikely to survive challenges in the lower courts.

Immigration has galvanized Trump’s supporters and is set to be a key part of his re-election campaign. But many in his own party are disappointed with his recourse to the National Emergencies Act of 1976 after talks arising from a 35-day government shutdown prompted by the issue of the wall produced only $1.375bn in congressionally approved funding for border security, none of it to be spent on new wall construction.

The question of whether Trump’s act was constitutional dominated the Sunday talk shows, administration figures and allies saying Trump was within his apportioned powers, Democrats saying otherwise.

Adam Schiff, the California Democrat who chairs the House intelligence committee, told CNN’s State of the Union if Congress “surrender[s] the power of the purse, there will be little check and no balance left. It’ll not be a separation of powers anymore, just a separation of parties.”

There have been 59 other national emergency declarations under the 1976 act but none involving a president seeking funds denied him by Congress.

The House and the Senate can now approve a resolution of disapproval, a process which will place Republicans who control the upper chamber under political pressure. Miller implied that if such a resolution is approved, Trump will use his power of veto for the first time.



“He’s going to protect his national emergency declaration, guaranteed,” he said.

Republican senators including Marco Rubio of Florida and Susan Collins of Maine have criticised the emergency declaration. On Sunday the Illinois Democratic senator Tammy Duckworth told ABC’s This Week she believed a resolution would pass.

But Trump ally Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican who leads the hard-right House Freedom Caucus, told the same show the president retained enough support to “make sure that there’s no override” of the veto.

“So it’s going to be settled in court,” he added. “We’ll have to wait and see.”

Announcing his move in the White House Rose Garden on Friday, Trump said he expected the question to go all the way to the supreme court, which he said he thought would back him. On Sunday California attorney general Xavier Becerra told ABC his state would sue “imminently” to block the order, joined by New Mexico, Oregon, Hawaii and Minnesota. The American Civil Liberties Union and the non-profit watchdog group Public Citizen announced on Friday they were taking legal action.

Undaunted, Miller, who was the architect of Trump’s effort to ban visitors to the US from several predominantly Muslim countries, claimed voters would likely see “probably a couple hundred miles [of border wall built] … I would say by the end of the next appropriation cycle”. That cycle ends in September of 2020, two months before the presidential election.

Miller claimed the administration had already had “120-odd miles that are already under construction or are already obligated” and said additional funds would increase the length of wall or fence by “a few hundred miles”. In reality, no new sections of wall, whether made of concrete or steel slats, have been built under Trump.

Miller rejected the assertion that a wall would not be effective against the arrival of undocumented migrants, which has been declining for more than two decades, or contribute to the interception of illegal drugs, which government figures show overwhelmingly enter the US through monitored ports and border crossings.

Instead, Miller repeated the White House position that weakness at southern border amounts to a grave threat to the social and economic coherence of the US itself.

“This is a deep intellectual problem that is plaguing this city,” he said, referring to Washington, “which is that we’ve had thousands of Americans die year after year after year because of threats crossing our southern border.

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“We have families and communities that are left unprotected and undefended. We have international narco-terrorist organizations. This is a threat in our country, not overseas. Not in Belarus. Not in Zimbabwe. Not in Afghanistan or Syria or Iraq but right here…”

He added: “And if the president can’t defend this country, then he cannot fulfill this constitutional oath of office.”

Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a Trump ally, put his shoulder to the wheel on CBS’ Face the Nation. Asked if he would approve of wall construction funds being drawn from military budgets such as that for a school on a base in Kentucky, he said: “I would say it’s better for the middle-school kids in Kentucky to have a secure border.

“We’ll get them the school they need. But right now we’ve got a national emergency on our hands. Opioid addiction is going through the roof in this country. Thousands of Americans died last year and dying this year because we can’t control the flow of drugs into this country and all of this coming across the border.”

On CNN, Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, a potential Democratic candidate for president in 2020, put it another way, referring to a familiar Trump promise from the campaign trail last time out.

“He couldn’t get the Mexicans to build the wall,” he said, “he couldn’t get Congress to vote the money in … He got turned down by Congress and then [he] went ahead and did it.”