Prince Harry was in Vancouver on Saturday to open the Invictus games, and it seems he won’t have any trouble getting back across the border after Donald Trump vowed not to deport the prince.
However the president didn’t miss the opportunity to take a wicked jab at Harry’s wife, Meghan Markle. When asked if he would force Harry to leave the U.S., Trump told the New York Post: “I don’t want to do that. I’ll leave him alone. He’s got enough problems with his wife. She’s terrible.”
However, Trump did praise Harry’s estranged older brother William in his interview with the New York Post, having met him in Paris ahead of the Notre-Dame de Paris reopening in December.
“I think William is a great young man,” he said.
Harry’s immigration status has been under the microscope in recent days after the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing conservative think tank which authored Project 2025, relaunched its legal efforts to force the U.S. authorities to release details of Prince Harry’s immigration application.
The suit was first launched after Harry revealed that he had used hard, soft, and psychedelic drugs in his memoir, Spare—in which Harry, among other stories, wrote of the time he got high on mushrooms at Friends star Courteney Cox’s house. He also revealed he had used cocaine at 17 “to feel different.”
Foundation representatives argued that such a declaration usually bars an individual from immigrating into the United States—alleging that Harry either lied on his immigration forms or was given a sweetheart deal by the Biden administration.
The Heritage Foundation sued the Department of Homeland Security after a FOIA request to view Harry’s immigration paperwork was largely rejected, reported the Associated Press. In September decision, a federal judge ruled the paperwork would remain private.
However the Heritage Foundation has now sought to appeal that ruling and a judge said on Thursday he was in favor of releasing the documents in principle.
An immigration lawyer previously told the Daily Beast that Harry could be vulnerable to a politically motivated attack on his residential status, saying: “Department of State decisions are discretionary and very susceptible to political influence. His visa could be canceled. He could be denied entry upon return to the U.S. from foreign travel for inadmissibility due to prior drug usage, despite an unexpired visa in his passport. There are many scenarios where political influence could impact Harry’s ability to re-enter the U.S.”
British celebrity Nigella Lawson was denied entry into the United States over admissions of drug use in 2013.
Trump told Nigel Farage in a GB News interview last year: “We’ll have to see if they know something about the drugs, and if he lied they’ll have to take appropriate action.”
Farage asked if “appropriate action” could mean “not staying in America,” to which Trump replied, according to the outlet’s website, “Oh I don’t know. You’ll have to tell me. You just have to tell me. You would have thought they would have known this a long time ago.”
The Sussex-Trump feud dates to a 2016 Comedy Central panel show in which Meghan, then an actress and not linked to Harry, expressed her contempt for Trump, labeling him “misogynistic” and “divisive,” and joking that she might move to Canada if Trump was elected president.
Trump later famously referred to her comment as “nasty” ahead of his state visit to the U.K. in June 2019, by which time he was president and Meghan had married Harry.
In 2022, Trump told fellow Meghan critic Piers Morgan: “Harry is whipped like no person I think I’ve ever seen.” He wagered that the couple would divorce, saying, “It’ll end, and it’ll end bad… I want to know what’s going to happen when Harry decides he’s had enough of being bossed around… Or maybe when she decides that she likes some other guy better.”
