Echoing remarks from a White House press conference Friday, President Trump reiterated Sunday his option to declare the United States’ porous southern border a national emergency, thereby circumventing Congress in order fund the construction of a physical barrier to halt illegal immigrants from simply walking into the country.
“I may decide a national emergency depending on what happens over the next few days,” President Trump told reporters from the White House lawn, several news outlets reported.
He added:
We have a meeting. Vice President Pence and a group will be going to a certain location – and you know where that is – and they’ll be having another meeting. I don’t expect anything to happen at that meeting, nor does the Vice President, but I think we are going to have some very serious talks come Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday.
We have to have border security. If we don’t have border security we are going to be crime-ridden and it’s going to get worse and worse. And we’re so sad watching the funeral of the slain police officer yesterday. Officer Singh. It was a very sad thing. But this is going on in many places.
If you go back to the year 2000, he have thousands of people that have been killed by illegal immigration. By people coming in to the country illegally and killing our citizens. We can’t have it.
After more than two weeks, President Trump is sticking by his demand for $5.6 billion in funding to begin construction of ‘The Wall’ – a key campaign promise. For their part, Democrats did offer $1.3 billion in border security funding, which the administration countered with an amount that has not been made public – all prior to the government funding deadline. Democrats failed to respond and with no funding agreement in place, the partial shutdown began.
As of this writing, Democrats have not countered the Trump Administration’s last offer.
