Threat to seal border
US President Donald Trump tweets that he will close US-Mexico border entirely if funds for wall are not approved.
washIngton: President Donald Trump threatened to seal the US-Mexico border “entirely” if Congress does not approve billions of dollars in funding for a wall.
In a burst of early morning tweets, the president said the alternative to funding his controversial wall project would be total separation from Mexico – including making US car companies pull out their factories based on the other side of the frontier.
The threat yet again upped the ante in a political row that has led to a partial shut down of the US government and seems set to dominate the start to the third year of Trump’s presidency.
“We will be forced to close the Southern Border entirely if the Obstructionist Democrats do not give us the money to finish the Wall,” Trump tweeted.
Trump said he would then take US-Mexican relations back to the days before Nafta (North American Free Trade Agreement) opened free trade across Canada, Mexico and the United States.
That would “bring our car industry back into the United States where it belongs,” he said.
It was not clear how separating the two huge neighbours would work.
Bilateral trade totalled an estimated US$615.9bil (RM2.56 trillion) in 2017, according to US government figures.
Neither did Trump make any mention of the new free trade agreement, known as the USMCA ( United States- Mexico- Canada Agreement), which he only recently signed with the two neighbouring countries to replace Nafta and which he has repeatedly praised as a huge boost for American commerce.
In Mexico, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador sidestepped Trump’s threat, telling journalists: “We don’t want to be imprudent and we don’t think we should get into this.”
Trump wants US$5bil (RM20.7bil) in funding for a wall along the more than 3,200km border, which he says is currently too porous to stop illegal immigration and which he claims has become a magnet for criminals, drugs and even terrorists.
Opponents – especially in the Democratic party but also some in Trump’s Republican party – say that a physical wall is impractical and that the idea is being used as a polit- ical tool to whip up xenophobia in Trump’s right-wing voter base.
Both sides have dug in. Democrats refuse to approve funding and the president – who has made hard line immigration policies a centrepiece of his presidency – has retaliated by refusing to sign off on a wider spending bill, leaving some 800,000 federal employees without pay.
Negotiations on lifting that partial government shutdown, perhaps by providing some border security funding, have sputtered out and no new debate is scheduled before next Wednesday.
The president, who had already scrapped a Christmas visit to his Florida golf resort, has also “cancelled his plans for New Year’s,” his incoming chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, said on Fox News.
Asked about the startling rhetoric, Mulvaney told Fox that Trump “is trying to draw light to the fact this is a crazy discussion to be having.”
For one Republican Congress member, Brad Wenstrup, the paralysis over the wall reflected “a lot of political posturing.
“I would hope that it could be ended soon,” he told CNN television. —AFP