Trump Declares Border ‘Crisis’ Without New Plan to End Impasse

* Democrats say in response there’s no crisis on Mexican
border
* Congressional leaders to meet with Trump on Wednesday

President Donald Trump demanded Congress provide billions more
to combat illegal migration in a prime-time address, stopping short
of declaring a national emergency and offering no new path to end a
paralyzing political dispute over his proposed wall on the Mexican
border.

“The only solution is for Democrats to pass a spending bill that
defends our borders and reopens our government,” Trump said Tuesday
during a roughly 10-minute televised speech from the Oval Office,
employing for the first time in his presidency a format
traditionally used to explain major military actions or to calm the
nation during times of crisis.

The address, aired on all major U.S. television networks, was
the latest step in Trump’s campaign to tackle what he called a
crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border. He is pushing to show supporters
he’s fighting for a key promise of his 2016 campaign, and by
appealing directly to Americans, he hoped to raise public pressure
on Democrats to agree to some additional funding for border
security.

“This is a humanitarian crisis,” Trump said. “A crisis of the
heart and a crisis of the soul.”

Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer on
Jan. 8.Photographer: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck
Schumer rejected Trump’s description of a crisis on the Mexican
border in their televised response to the president’s address.

“President Trump must stop holding the American people hostage,
must stop manufacturing a crisis, and must reopen the government,”
Pelosi said.

Standing next to Pelosi, Schumer said only Trump should be
blamed for the shutdown.

“American democracy doesn’t work that way,” Schumer said. “We
don’t govern by temper tantrum. No president should pound the table
and demand he gets his way or else the government shuts down,
hurting millions of Americans who are treated as leverage.”

In his remarks, Trump criticized opponents who have called the
proposed border wall “immoral,” saying that “the only thing that is
immoral is the politicians to do nothing and continue to allow more
innocent people to be so horribly victimized.” He rattled off a
series of statistics about migration across the border, and cited
examples of brutal crimes he said had been committed by immigrants
who had illegally entered the U.S.

The statistics Trump cited included Immigration and Customs
Enforcement’s arrests of hundreds of thousands of “aliens with
criminal records” over the past two years. ICE enforces immigration
law within the U.S., not on the borders. Its numbers include people
convicted of violent offenses, but also those convicted of
nonviolent crimes including illegal entry or re-entry to the
country.

He also called the southern border “a pipeline for vast
quantities of illegal drugs,” suggesting a wall would stem the
flow. In fact, most illegal drugs are smuggled into the country
through ports of entry, according to the Drug Enforcement Agency
and Department of Homeland Security.

The president and Vice President Mike Pence are expected to have
lunch with Senate Republicans on Wednesday at the Capitol, and
Trump will meet with congressional leaders of both parties at the
White House. The president is scheduled to travel to the southern
border on Thursday to further amplify his case for building a
wall.

Trump did not offer any new ideas for resolving an impasse
that’s led to a partial government shutdown, now in its 18th day.
He’s demanded $5.7 billion to build about 234 miles of new physical
barrier on the border, as well as billions more over currently
appropriated spending levels for border security and to detain
migrants caught crossing illegally into the U.S.

Some of Trump’s conservative allies had pushed him to declare a
national emergency related to the border in the speech, a
possibility he didn’t even mention. The move, his allies believe,
may be Trump’s only path to meet his campaign promise to build the
wall while Democrats have control of the House. Even if it were
blocked by courts, Trump might declare a face-saving victory with
such an order and reopen the government.

“He’s fighting against almost every way that people can actually
legally enter this country, forcing them to become undocumented and
then he’s trying to attack their undocumented status,”
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the self-described Bronx
socialist, said on MSNBC. “This is systematic, it is wrong and it
is anti-American.”

The Trump administration has done little else to make the case
for a border crisis. Apprehensions of migrants at the U.S. southern
border have generally fallen for the past two decades, from 1.6
million in fiscal 2000 to 396,579 in fiscal 2018. Last year’s
apprehensions were up compared to 2017 — which at 303,916 were the
fewest in nearly half a century — but down or about the same level
as every full year during the Obama administration.

Public opinion is not on Trump’s side and has slipped further as
the shutdown wears on. Fifty-one percent of adults surveyed Jan.
1-7 said Trump “deserves most of the blame” for the shutdown,
according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released Tuesday. That’s up four
points from a similar poll conducted Dec. 21-25.

Congressional Democrats are most to blame in the view of 32
percent of those surveyed, while congressional Republicans are seen
as most to blame by 7 percent, according to the poll.

Polling is more favorable for Trump on the border situation more
generally. A Morning Consult/Politico poll conducted Jan. 4-6 found
that 42 percent of the nearly 2,000 registered voters surveyed said
they believe there is a “crisis” on the southern border caused by
illegal immigration. Thirty-seven percent said it’s just a
“problem,” and 12 percent said they don’t think conditions rise
even to the level of a problem.

Trump’s re-election campaign anticipated that the speech would
be a winner with the president’s base, sending an email Tuesday
signed by the president setting the goal of raising $500,000 in a
single day. The amount would be “so HUGE,” the message said, that
“even Democrats and the Fake News won’t be able to ignore” Trump’s
argument.

Culled from bloomberg.com