Rick Scott on travel ban: ‘The president’s job is to keep us all safe’

Tuesday in Jacksonville saw Gov. Rick Scott address the travel ban upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Decried as a “Muslim ban” by critics, President Donald Trump nonetheless is upholding the ban on travel from Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela and Yemen as essential to national security.

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The Supreme Court backed Trump’s play by a 5-4 margin, including negating the proposition statements made by the President on the campaign trail should factor in the interpretation of the policy.

In Jacksonville Tuesday to spotlight proposed reforms during his Make Washington Work tour, Scott backed the President on the travel ban, as well as addressing the broader issue of border security.

“The President’s job is to keep us all safe,” Scott said. “That’s his job.”

Describing Florida as a “melting pot,” Scott said, “we love legal immigration in our state.”

However, “people ought to be vetted. We shouldn’t let people into our country who want to harm us, who don’t believe in the principles that we all believe in.”

“A lot of these problems are caused because Congress has failed to act,” Scott added. “They’ve failed to secure our borders, they sit there and just do speeches and photo ops, but they don’t go do their jobs. Secure our borders. Fix our immigration policy. Then we wouldn’t have so many of these problems.”

Regarding secure borders, one of the biggest controversies of 2018 for the Trump administration has been the separation of families of migrants coming across the Mexican border.

Florida Politics asked Scott, who has demonstrated an interest in policy relative to Latin America throughout his two terms as Governor, if the United States was to blame for creating the conditions that led to migration from those countries.

“It’s actually the two Castro brothers’ fault … their thugs are in Venezuela now, Nicaragua, causing civil unrest. You look at a place like Venezuela, a beautiful country, they don’t have enough medicine to take care of the children. People don’t have enough food now. It’s all because of the Castro brothers.”

Saying that he believed in promoting democracy and freedom worldwide, Scott noted that in Florida, “what happens in Latin America has a big impact on us … and we have to do whatever we can to promote freedom and democracy.”

Scott was optimistic about the new Colombian president, but: “What [Nicolas] Maduro is doing in Venezuela and what [Daniel] Ortega is doing in Nicaragua is despicable.”