US LAWMAKERS REACH AGREEMENT
IN PRINCIPLE TO AVERT SHUTDOWN
WASHINGTON - Key lawmakers announced a tentative deal late Monday that would avert another government shutdown at the end of the week while denying President Donald Trump much of the money he’s sought to build new walls along the U.s.-mexico border.
The agreement came together during intense hours of closeddoor negotiations at the Capitol in which lawmakers resurrected talks that had fallen apart over the weekend in a dispute over new Democratic demands to limit immigrant detention. Democrats ultimately dropped some of those demands, which had come under fire from Republicans, clearing the way for a deal.
Lawmakers on both sides said they were motivated to find agreement by the looming specter of another government shutdown Friday night, three weeks after the last one ended.
“What brought us back together I thought, tonight, was we didn’t want that to happen,” said Senate Appropriations Chairman Richard Shelby, R-ala., the lead Republican in the talks.
The deal includes $1.375 billion for 55 miles of fences along the border, compared with $5.7 billion Trump had sought for more than 200 miles of walls. The deal omits a strict new cap Democrats had sought on immigrants detained within the United States - as opposed to at the border. At the same time, it reduces an overall cap on detention beds maintained by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, although GOP aides said ICE would have enough money and flexibility to maintain its current detention levels and add more when needed.
To avert a shutdown, the deal needs to be written into final legislation, passed by both the House and Senate, and signed into law by the president by midnight Friday.
White House officials were reviewing the terms of the deal, and Shelby said he hoped Trump would be supportive. But details of the compromise disclosed late Monday quickly came under fire from conservatives, raising the prospect of a backlash from the right that could ultimately render it unacceptable to Trump.
The president has readied a plan to declare a national emergency on the southern border, which he believes will allow him to redirect taxpayer money from other projects to build parts of a wall - without approval from Congress. Democrats are all but certain to mount a legal challenge to this approach.
At a rally in El Paso, Texas, on Monday night, Trump told a crowd of supporters that he was briefed on the conference committee’s progress as he was walking onstage. “Just so you know - we’re building the wall anyway,” Trump declared to the audience.
The president cast the Democratic proposal on detention beds as a dangerous idea.
The reaction from his conservative allies left the ultimate outcome in doubt, but negotiators said that with the president’s assent, there would be time for the legislation to pass the House and Senate and be signed ahead of the deadline, when large portions of the government, including the Homeland Security Department, would run out of funding and begin to shut down.
Negotiators said the deal would fund all government operations through the end of September, potentially removing shutdown threats for the remainder of the fiscal year.