President Donald Trump's push for extreme vetting of immigrants and for ending the Diversity Visa Program after the New York terror attack were "a call to action," White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Wednesday.
"The fact is we have a lottery system that randomly decides who gets the greatest opportunity in the world," she said at the daily press briefing. "One of the best things that we have in this country is the fact that everybody wants to be here.
"To give that away randomly — and to have no vetting system, to have no way to determine who comes, why they are here, and if they want to contribute to the society is a problem.
"The president strongly supports making sure that the people that come here want to be here for the right reasons," she added, "and not to bring harm to our country.
"I don't think that's something that any American shouldn't want to support."
President Trump tweeted late Tuesday that he had directed the Department of Homeland Security to step up the administration's extreme vetting efforts after the Manhattan truck attack that killed eight people and injured at least a dozen others by an immigrant from Uzbekistan.
The suspect, Sayfullo Saipov, 29, came to the United States in 2010 and had lived in Paterson, N.J., which has a large Islamic population, and in cities in Ohio and Florida.
President Trump also said Wednesday that he would ask Congress to "immediately" work to terminate the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program, through which he said Saipov entered the U.S.
Authorities have not yet said that was the case.
"We will take all necessary steps to protect our people," Trump told reporters at the start of a Cabinet meeting at the White House.
On the Diversity Visa Program, Sanders told reporters: "We'll continue pushing for and advocating for getting rid of this program.
"We would like to see the lottery Visa program not be part of any immigration system that we have in this country."
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