How Trump is locked in Mexican wall stand-off
US PRESIDENT LOCKED IN MEXICAN STAND-OFF WITH DEMOCRATS OVER HIS ‘BIG BEAUTIFUL WALL’
Build it . And they won’t come. That’s the logic of US President
Build it — and they won’t come. That’s the logic of United States President Donald Trump in making the case for a permanent steel or concrete wall stretching along his nation’s southern border with Mexico.
It’s a structure he says is needed urgently to stem what he claims is a growing humanitarian and security crisis there. For critics, mostly Democrats who now control the House of Representatives in America’s 116th Congress, there is no crisis, there’s no need for it, and it would be largely ineffective anyway.
Last Tuesday night, in his first prime-time address from the Oval Office, Trump pitched his case for the wall. He and Democrats are in a protracted standoff over funding for the wall.
Trump wants $5.7 billion (Dh20.96 billion) now to construct it — money he says he will find in the Pentagon budget by declaring a national emergency and using the military to build it.
Democrats are refusing to budge, and the standoff has left more than 800,000 US federal government workers off the job in the longest-ever shutdown in Washington.
Trump says he’s willing to keep the government shut down for months, years even, to fulfil one of his key campaign promises. That southern border, where California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas meet Mexico, is 3,145 kilometres long. Some 1,045km of that border is already fortified, and the president wants the rest built urgently.
Series of bills
According to the New York Times, since Trump took office almost two years ago, no new fencing has been built — a fact that weighs heavily on his populist constituency that bought into his message for better border security to curb immigrants and curtail America’s crime rate.
The new Democrat-controlled House of Representatives has prepared a series of bills that would get the federal government workers back on the job — but which don’t allocate money for building the wall.
Even if those are agreed to by the Republican-controlled Senate, the bills still require the signature of Trump to take effect. And he says he will veto those bills until he gets the funds for the wall.