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(WASHINGTON) – Two days after the closure of a record, the White House has clearly announced Sunday that President Donald Trump was ready to close the government without congressional approval on the wall of the border.
The confrontation between the president and the Democrats at Capitol Hill is far from over and the countdown begins: the bill of expenditure signed by Trump Friday finances the government agencies that had been closed for 35 days until February 15 .
We do not know if the Democrats will move. Trump seemed to be fighting, sending a series of online messages announcing the coming fight with lawmakers. "BUILD A WALL AND THE CRIME WILL FALL!" He tweeted.
Is Trump ready to shut down the government in three weeks?
The brief bulletin
"Yeah, I think it's really," said Mick Mulvaney, Acting Cabinet Director of the White House. "He does not want to close the government, let's explain that very clearly. He does not want to declare a national emergency. "
But Mulvaney said that in the end, the president's commitment is to defend the nation and he will do it with or without the Congress.
Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, a member of the Democratic leadership in the House, said his colleagues are looking for "evidence-based" legislation.
"Closures are not legitimate bargaining tactics when there is a public policy disagreement between two branches of government," he said.
The cornerstone of the confrontation is Trump's $ 5.7 billion request for his prized wall at the US-Mexico border, a project the Democrats see as an ineffective and useless monument to Trump's ridiculous campaign promise.
California representative Kevin McCarthy, the Republican leader in the House, said the Democrats had funded border barriers in the past and were simply refusing because Trump was asking for it.
"The president is the only one who has been reasonable in these negotiations," he said.
Mulvaney will not say directly if Trump would take less than $ 5.7 billion, but said the president was willing to negotiate.
"The president has already gone to see the Democrats and said, look, this is not a dike going 3,000 km to the sea."
Trump said a "crisis" on the southern border needed a wall, blaming previous presidents and Congress for failing to reshape the immigration system that has allowed millions of people to live illegally in the United States.
Last month, he had calculated this figure at 35 million, then Sunday at 25.7 million and more – figures provided without evidence. "I do not know exactly where the president got this issue this morning," Mulvaney said.
Both are higher than government and private estimates.
Its chief of internal security quoted "somewhere" between 11 and 22 million last month. In November, the Pew Research Center, a non-partisan organization, reported $ 10.7 million in 2016 – the lowest level in a decade.
The president also tweeted on Sunday that the cost of illegal immigration so far this year rose to nearly $ 19 billion; he did not mention a source.
Compare that with research conducted in 2017 by a conservative group, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which advocates less immigration: $ 135 billion a year, or about $ 11.25 billion a month, which figure includes health care and education, as well as spending on immigration enforcement. .
In the coming weeks, a bipartisan committee of House and Senate legislators will review border spending as part of the legislative process and may call on external experts.
Jeffries said the Democrats were willing to invest in additional infrastructure, especially at legal entry points where the majority of drugs enter the country.
"We are willing to invest in staff. We are willing to invest in additional technology. … In the past we have supported improved fencing and I think it's something that should be on the table, "he said.
Senator Roy Blunt, R-Mo. says that he thinks that a compromise is possible.
"The president stepped in after talking about a wall on the entire southern border at some point in the campaign … leave barriers where they work and leave something else where the barriers would not work as well," Blunt said.
The partial closure of the federal government ended on Friday when Trump gave in to pressure, pulling out of his demand that Congress pledge to fund the border wall before federal agencies could resume work. The bill he signed did not provide Trump 's money wanted for the creation of a fence that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi described as "bad money". "immoral" and insisted that Congress would not fund.
Mulvaney said Trump had agreed to temporarily end the closure of the system, with some Democrats publicly and privately demonstrating that they agreed with Trump's plan to better secure the border.
Mulvaney said that they had told Trump that they could not part ways with Pelosi and Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, and work with the White House if the government remained closed.
"Everyone wants to look at this and say that the president has lost," Mulvaney said. "We are still negotiating."
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