United States President Donald Trump on Wednesday (February 1) slammed the agreement inked by the previous Obama administration with Australia to accept refugees from Down Under, calling it a "dumb deal" to take "illegal immigrants."
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Trump made the remarks on Twitter, a few days after his telephonic conversation with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, which the former reportedly described as "the worst by far".
In his tweet, the US president said: "Do you believe it? The Obama Administration agreed to take thousands of illegal immigrants from Australia. Why? I will study this dumb deal!"
The deal in question was brokered between the US and Australian governments in the final weeks of the Obama administration. It was set to take refugees from Manus Island and Nauru and their exact number is 1,250.
Trump reportedly accused the Australian PM of seeking to export "next Boston bombers" to the US and said the deal will kill him politically.
Turnbull, while speaking to Sydney radio station 2GB, said: "This is not a deal that he would have done or that he would regard as a good deal. But the question is will he commit to honour the deal. He has given that commitment."
The Australian PM said despite Trump's tweet on Wednesday, the US officials were already assessing the issue. He also regretted that the details of the conversation between the two leaders got leaked.
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Turnbull, however, said the reports of Trump hanging up the phone were not correct and termed his talks with the latte as "very frank and forthright".
Irrespective of what Trump felt about the agreement with Australia, his administration has been giving mixed signals about it. Early on Wednesday, the White House issued a statement saying Trump was considering whether to honour the deal. After some time, the State Department told ABC News that they would go ahead with the deal.
The department even said that all refugees "would only come to the United States in accordance with the recently signed executive order".
However, Trump's angry tweet about "studying" the deal has left Australia in a fresh conundrum.
