Speaking to reporters at the White House Wednesday morning, Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said President Trump hasn’t made a decision yet on whether he’ll sign or veto a border security deal reached by Congress.
"We want to see what the final piece of legislation looks like. It’s hard to say definitively whether or not the president is going to sign it until we know everything that’s in it,” Sanders said. “Unlike Nancy Pelosi we actually like to read legislation before we agree to it. The president isn’t fully happy, as he said yesterday with everything that’s in the legislation but there are some positive pieces of it.”
The current deal provides a little more than $1 billion for new border barriers, far from the original $26 billion and the White House’s most recent ask of $5.6 billion.
“At the end of the day the president is going to build the wall,” she continued. “He’s got the support of Americans all over the country.”
President Trump is still keeping a national emergency declaration as an option and is currently making changes to the legislation.
"The president’s got a number of options, he’s going to keep all those on the table. We’ll make a determination of what is necessary, based on what the final piece of legislation looks like,” Sanders said about a possible declaration.
Yesterday President Trump said he “wasn’t happy” with the latest bill before a meeting with his Cabinet.
Earlier today, CNN and CBS News reported he would be signing the legislation.
Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is chalking up the latest deal as a win in a divided government.
“It provides another significant down payment on the president’s plan to secure our nation’s borders with new physical barriers and keep American communities safe,” McConnell said on the Senate floor Wednesday morning. “It provides nearly $1.4 billion for new barriers in the Border Patrol’s highest-priority areas, enough to build nearly twice as many miles as were funded last year. It gives ICE the capacity and the flexibility to continue responding to surges in illegal immigration. And it continues to provide the president with appropriate reprogramming authority, so he can direct additional funding toward urgent homeland security priorities should circumstances require.”
“Of course, in addition to all this, the legislation will wrap up all of our outstanding regular appropriations bills and get the entire federal government funded the right way. It goes without saying that neither side is getting everything it wants. That’s the way it goes in divided government,” he continued.
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