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Trump says undocumented immigrants "aren't people, they're animals"

"You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people; they’re animals”

The undocumented immigrants the Trump administration has been kicking out of the U.S. are “animals,” President Donald Trump said.

"We're taking people out of the country. You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people; they’re animals,” the president said during a White House roundtable on sanctuary cities.

The meeting was convened with local officials to discuss how such policies — which involve non-compliance with federal immigration agencies — have undermined law enforcement. California has picked many high-profile fights with the Trump administration, not least of which was to declare itself a “sanctuary state.”

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Trump has responded by attacking the immigrants' character. “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists,” he said of Mexican immigrants during his announcement in 2015 that he’d be running for president. “And some, I assume, are good people.”

The president added during the roundtable on Wednesday that the mayor of Oakland, California, Libby Schaaf, should be investigated by the Department of Justice for obstructing justice. Schaaf notified her constituents when she heard that Immigrations and Customs Enforcement would be conducting a raid in one of her communities.

The Justice Department is already suing the state of California over its sanctuary cities policies. Trump said, too, that the U.S. has the “dumbest laws on immigration in the world.”

California Gov. Jerry Brown tweeted out his response, saying Californians, “the citizens of the fifth-largest economy in the world, are not impressed.”

Image via Getty