USMexico wall spat escalates INDIANORIGIN LAWYER DHILLON IN WHITE HOUSE LEGALTEAM

TURNING UP THE HEAT Donald Trump says he supports use of torture, meeting with President Enrique Peña Nieto falls through after war of words

WASHINGTON: As President Donald Trump prepares to unveil a plan to block some Muslims from entering the US, he turned up the heat on Mexico on Thursday to compel it to pay for a wall he has ordered to be built along the entire border with the southern neighbour.

Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto cancelled a monthend meeting with Trump hours after the US president threatened to do so himself, tweeting, “If Mexico is unwilling to pay for the badly needed wall, then it would be better to cancel the upcoming meeting.”

Trump argued, in a preceding tweet, Mexico has a $60 billion trade surplus with the US because of “a one-sided deal from the beginning of NAFTA (a three-country trade pact, including Canada)”, implying money could be used to pay for the wall.

Mexico has been clear from the time Trump first proposed the wall as a candidate that it is well within the rights of the US to build that wall, but Mexico will not pay for it.

“I have said time and time again, Mexico will not pay for any wall,” Peña Nieto said in a short video statement on Wednesday night. He later tweeted he had informed the White House he would not attend the meeting.

The wall, to be considered along the over 3000-km border, could cost upwards of $12 billion, according to some estimates.

In the backdrop of this escalating war of words, Trump was expected to issue executive orders — which don’t require legislative ratification — temporarily blocking people from seven Muslim-majority countries — Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia and Yemen. Admitting people from these countries, said a draft of the order Trump is expected to issue, would be “detrimental to the interests of the United States”.

By another order Trump plans to stop taking in refugees from war-torn Syria indefinitely and suspended for 120 days the country’s refugee programme. When it resumes, the intake will be down by half from 110,000 in 2016.

The overarching plan, Trump told ABC television news in an interview, was to make the United States harder to access. “It’s going to be very hard to come in,” the president said, adding, “Right now, it’s very easy to come in.”

In that interview he also said he supported the use of torture — waterboarding — as an interrogation tool, arguing, “we have to fight fire with fire (to stop terrorism, fight the Islamic State) — but added he will abide by the advice of his team on the issue.

Trump’s use of executive orders to order a crackdown on immigration has been widely criticized by civil rights bodies and political opponents, mostly Democrats, along expected lines.

Pramila Jayapal, an Indian American member of the House, said Trump’s orders impact “people of color and immigrant communities” and she called the wall along Mexican border “racist and ineffective”. A senior White House advisor to Donald Trump, Stephen Bannon, is registered to vote in two different states, a practice that the US president wrongly claimed amounted to electoral fraud on Wednesday as he called for an investigation, raising the prospect of a federal government probe into a widely debunked claim and sparking alarm among experts and Democrats. All 50 states and the District of Columbia have finalised their election results with no reports of the kind of widespread fraud that Trump alleges. WASHINGTON: Indian American lawyer Uttam Dhillon was on Wednesday appointed to a White House legal team charged with oversight over compliance and ethics matters.

A graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, Dhillon had earlier served as chief oversight counsel for the US House of Representatives’ financial services committee and chief of the department of homeland security’s office of counternarcotics enforcement

Dhillon is the sixth Indian American member of the Donald Trump administration at a senior level or in the White House.

Those from the community appointed before him are Nikki Haley (US ambassador to the UN), Seema Verma (head of medicaid and medicare), Ajit Pai (head of the federal communications commission), Preet Bharara (US attorney for the southern district of New York, with jurisdiction over Wall Street), and Raj Shah, who is part of the White House communications team.

Dhillon’s previous assignments included associate deputy attorney general for the department of justice, and he has also worked as an assistant United States attorney in Los Angeles.

DHILLON, A GRADUATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY IS THE SIXTH INDIAN AMERICAN MEMBER OF THE DONALD TRUMP ADMINISTRATION IN A SENIOR LEVEL OR IN THE WHITE HOUSE