Yongpeng Sun-Tastaufen
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WASHINGTON - Rallying cheering supporters in West Virginia, President Donald Trump called border security the “beating heart” of this election and suggested to the faithful that he has $3.2 billion for his long-promised border wall.
“The wall - right now, that wall is coming along. We're over $3 billion, it's moving along very nicely. Very nicely,” Trump told a packed arena in Charleston on Tuesday night.
Left unsaid was that Congress has approved only half that amount, and that the battle for more money comes amid the threat of another government shutdown - possibly at the end of September, scarcely a month before the November midterm elections which could serve as a referendum on his first two years in office.
Of the $1.6 billion Congress allocated for border security this year, almost all was to reinforce and expand existing barriers - not the wall that Trump campaigned on. In a further setback for the administration, a government watchdog agency found this month that the wall prototypes commissioned by the Department of Homeland Security would not always work for the rugged terrain along the Mexican border.
Environmental challenges also are pending in the courts.
Nevertheless, Trump has maintained on several occasions in recent months that work on the project is well underway.
“We're getting the wall built. It's going up, we're getting it built,” Trump said to more applause in West Virginia. “So we have $3.2 billion. We're looking for $5 billion this year, and all of a sudden it's going to be finished and it's going to be very, very effective.”
The political reality, however, looks very different.
Trump’s new push for $5 billion is more than double the $2.2 billion the administration asked for in its latest request in June, upping the ante substantially ahead of an election that could determine control of Congress.
While the House Republican majority has proposed $5 billion in a 2019 spending bill, the Senate has proposed $1.6 billion in funding to beef up existing barriers. Even that is subject to negotiation, given that Republicans would need the votes of at least nine Senate Democrats to get the 60 needed to pass a major spending bill.
“We’ll do everything we can to get the president’s demand,” said Texas U.S. Sen John Cornyn, the No. 2 Republican in the chamber. “But in the end, obviously there’ll have to be some negotiation taking place.”
As it stands, Trump was able to wrangle only $1.6 billion to beef up the border this year as part of a $1.3 trillion “omnibus” spending bill. It passed in March in the face of a veto threat from Trump, who complained that the wall was “not fully funded.”
Despite Trump’s boast, that $1.6 billion remains the total amount Congress has approved so far for a project that is estimated to cost as much as $25 billion to complete.
As elections near, shutdown politics gets risky
Asked about the $3.2 billion Trump claimed at last week’s rally, White House spokesman Judson Deere said that the president was counting the administration’s original $1.6 billion request for 2019, which he said is “currently anticipated” from Congress.
That total, Deere added, “is the amount DHS requested as a down payment for the first two years of construction.”
But many Democrats remain adamantly opposed to continued wall spending absent a broader immigration deal on family separations at the border, curbs on Trump’s “zero tolerance” enforcement policies, and legal protections for “Dreamers” brought into the country illegally as children.
The fight over Trump’s effort to end the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program already has led to two brief government shutdowns this year, one in January and another in February.
POLITICAL FALLOUT: Trump immigration policies endanger Texas Republicans ahead of midterm elections
Among the most outspoken congressional critics of the wall was Brownsville Democrat Filemon Vela, who lamented the willingness of some 100 Democrats, including Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, to go along with the $1.6 billion in wall funding for 2018.
The political environment in the runup to the November elections could be more challenging, Vela said. “Things are so crazy right now that Democrats may finally take a stand and draw a line in the sand.”
Trump, for his part, vowed in a tweet last month that he would be willing to shut down government “if the Democrats do not give us the votes on Border Security, which includes the Wall!”
But with the end of the 2018 fiscal year falling on September 30 - less than 40 days before the midterm elections - Republican leaders in Congress have urged the White House to delay the debate over immigration until after November.
“I certainly don’t like playing shutdown politics,” Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson told CBS’s Face the Nation, acknowledging that a government closure could hurt GOP chances of holding both chambers of Congress.
Even with majorities in both wings of the Capitol, Republicans have had a hard time allocating dollars to anything resembling Trump’s vision of a “big, beautiful wall.”
So far, it’s mostly ‘replacement wall’
After the collapse of a deal to trade a DACA fix for $25 billion in wall funding, Congress went small and attached strings. Little to none of the $1.6 billion Congress provided in March could be used toward the sort of wall Trump campaigned on in 2016, when he vowed to make Mexico cover the costs.
Instead, much of the money was slated for fixing or reinforcing existing barriers on the southwest border, including four miles of 30-foot bollard wall in El Paso and about 25 miles of pedestrian levee fencing in the Rio Grande Valley.
“It’s basically replacement wall,” said Vicki Gaubeca, director of the Southern Border Communities Coalition, which represents 60 local groups from San Diego to Brownsville. “The idea that Trump’s border wall is under construction is just political theater.”
Complicating Trump’s task was this month’s U.S. Government Accountability Office report on wall designs, which found that most of the prototypes designed for DHS failed to take into account border terrain and construction challenges. Taking those factors into consideration, the GAO said, the wall could “cost more than projected, take longer than planned, or not fully perform as expected.”
The report also gave ammunition to wall skeptics in Congress, including border hawks in both parties who argue that security requires more than physical barriers.
“We cannot continue using border security as a campaign strategy to attract crowds,” said Laredo Democrat Henry Cuellar, who sought unsuccessfully to shift wall spending in the pending House bill to technology and programming.
About half the people living illegally in the U.S., Cuellar noted, arrived with legally issued visas and stayed after they expired.
Meanwhile, even some of Trump’s Republican allies in Congress have pressed for a view of border security that puts less emphasis on a wall.
“I’m absolutely committed to border security that works, including the infrastructure which some people refer to as ‘the wall,’” Cornyn said. “But I think it’s really more of a system of infrastructure, technology and personnel, and I want to make sure that it is adequately funded because we’ve got a lot of work to do to make sure our border is more secure.”
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/ne...-wall-boast-runs-into-budget-maw-13179811.php
“The wall - right now, that wall is coming along. We're over $3 billion, it's moving along very nicely. Very nicely,” Trump told a packed arena in Charleston on Tuesday night.
Left unsaid was that Congress has approved only half that amount, and that the battle for more money comes amid the threat of another government shutdown - possibly at the end of September, scarcely a month before the November midterm elections which could serve as a referendum on his first two years in office.
Of the $1.6 billion Congress allocated for border security this year, almost all was to reinforce and expand existing barriers - not the wall that Trump campaigned on. In a further setback for the administration, a government watchdog agency found this month that the wall prototypes commissioned by the Department of Homeland Security would not always work for the rugged terrain along the Mexican border.
Environmental challenges also are pending in the courts.
Nevertheless, Trump has maintained on several occasions in recent months that work on the project is well underway.
“We're getting the wall built. It's going up, we're getting it built,” Trump said to more applause in West Virginia. “So we have $3.2 billion. We're looking for $5 billion this year, and all of a sudden it's going to be finished and it's going to be very, very effective.”
The political reality, however, looks very different.
Trump’s new push for $5 billion is more than double the $2.2 billion the administration asked for in its latest request in June, upping the ante substantially ahead of an election that could determine control of Congress.
While the House Republican majority has proposed $5 billion in a 2019 spending bill, the Senate has proposed $1.6 billion in funding to beef up existing barriers. Even that is subject to negotiation, given that Republicans would need the votes of at least nine Senate Democrats to get the 60 needed to pass a major spending bill.
“We’ll do everything we can to get the president’s demand,” said Texas U.S. Sen John Cornyn, the No. 2 Republican in the chamber. “But in the end, obviously there’ll have to be some negotiation taking place.”
As it stands, Trump was able to wrangle only $1.6 billion to beef up the border this year as part of a $1.3 trillion “omnibus” spending bill. It passed in March in the face of a veto threat from Trump, who complained that the wall was “not fully funded.”
Despite Trump’s boast, that $1.6 billion remains the total amount Congress has approved so far for a project that is estimated to cost as much as $25 billion to complete.
As elections near, shutdown politics gets risky
Asked about the $3.2 billion Trump claimed at last week’s rally, White House spokesman Judson Deere said that the president was counting the administration’s original $1.6 billion request for 2019, which he said is “currently anticipated” from Congress.
That total, Deere added, “is the amount DHS requested as a down payment for the first two years of construction.”
But many Democrats remain adamantly opposed to continued wall spending absent a broader immigration deal on family separations at the border, curbs on Trump’s “zero tolerance” enforcement policies, and legal protections for “Dreamers” brought into the country illegally as children.
The fight over Trump’s effort to end the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program already has led to two brief government shutdowns this year, one in January and another in February.
POLITICAL FALLOUT: Trump immigration policies endanger Texas Republicans ahead of midterm elections
Among the most outspoken congressional critics of the wall was Brownsville Democrat Filemon Vela, who lamented the willingness of some 100 Democrats, including Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, to go along with the $1.6 billion in wall funding for 2018.
The political environment in the runup to the November elections could be more challenging, Vela said. “Things are so crazy right now that Democrats may finally take a stand and draw a line in the sand.”
Trump, for his part, vowed in a tweet last month that he would be willing to shut down government “if the Democrats do not give us the votes on Border Security, which includes the Wall!”
But with the end of the 2018 fiscal year falling on September 30 - less than 40 days before the midterm elections - Republican leaders in Congress have urged the White House to delay the debate over immigration until after November.
“I certainly don’t like playing shutdown politics,” Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson told CBS’s Face the Nation, acknowledging that a government closure could hurt GOP chances of holding both chambers of Congress.
Even with majorities in both wings of the Capitol, Republicans have had a hard time allocating dollars to anything resembling Trump’s vision of a “big, beautiful wall.”
So far, it’s mostly ‘replacement wall’
After the collapse of a deal to trade a DACA fix for $25 billion in wall funding, Congress went small and attached strings. Little to none of the $1.6 billion Congress provided in March could be used toward the sort of wall Trump campaigned on in 2016, when he vowed to make Mexico cover the costs.
Instead, much of the money was slated for fixing or reinforcing existing barriers on the southwest border, including four miles of 30-foot bollard wall in El Paso and about 25 miles of pedestrian levee fencing in the Rio Grande Valley.
“It’s basically replacement wall,” said Vicki Gaubeca, director of the Southern Border Communities Coalition, which represents 60 local groups from San Diego to Brownsville. “The idea that Trump’s border wall is under construction is just political theater.”
Complicating Trump’s task was this month’s U.S. Government Accountability Office report on wall designs, which found that most of the prototypes designed for DHS failed to take into account border terrain and construction challenges. Taking those factors into consideration, the GAO said, the wall could “cost more than projected, take longer than planned, or not fully perform as expected.”
The report also gave ammunition to wall skeptics in Congress, including border hawks in both parties who argue that security requires more than physical barriers.
“We cannot continue using border security as a campaign strategy to attract crowds,” said Laredo Democrat Henry Cuellar, who sought unsuccessfully to shift wall spending in the pending House bill to technology and programming.
About half the people living illegally in the U.S., Cuellar noted, arrived with legally issued visas and stayed after they expired.
Meanwhile, even some of Trump’s Republican allies in Congress have pressed for a view of border security that puts less emphasis on a wall.
“I’m absolutely committed to border security that works, including the infrastructure which some people refer to as ‘the wall,’” Cornyn said. “But I think it’s really more of a system of infrastructure, technology and personnel, and I want to make sure that it is adequately funded because we’ve got a lot of work to do to make sure our border is more secure.”
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/ne...-wall-boast-runs-into-budget-maw-13179811.php
