Texas: US President Donald Trump has announced that he would be “building the wall anyway”, while referring to setting up a barrier on the US-Mexico border, on Monday night at a rally in El Paso here. “We’ll be building the wall anyway. They (Congressmen) say that progress has been made. I said: ‘Wait a minute, I gotta take care of my people from Texas, I’ve got to go, I don’t even wanna hear about it.’ So I don’t know what they mean (when they say) ‘progress has been made,” Trump said, according to Sputnik.
This comes after Congressional negotiators announced that “an agreement in principle” had been reached on funding for border security, with more than USD 1.3 billion allocated for the barrier alone, reports Fox News. Trump had previously asked for a budget allocation of USD five billion to build the US-Mexico border wall.
An impasse between the US Congress and Trump over funding for the wall had earlier triggered the longest-ever partial government shutdown in the US, which lasted for 35 days and left scores of federal workers without pay for the period. A stop-gap measure is currently in place until February 15, during which negotiators are trying to finalise a deal that would avoid plunging the US back into the state of shutdown again.
