{"id":27276,"date":"2018-12-29T02:22:18","date_gmt":"2018-12-29T02:22:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=27276"},"modified":"2018-12-29T02:22:18","modified_gmt":"2018-12-29T02:22:18","slug":"trump-threatens-to-seal-us-mexico-border-if-wall-is-not-built","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=27276","title":{"rendered":"Trump threatens to seal US-Mexico border if wall is not built"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

US President Donald Trump<\/a> has threatened to seal the United States-Mexico border<\/a> “entirely” if Congress does not approve billions of dollars in funding for a wall.<\/p>\n

In a burst of early morning tweets on Friday, Trump said the alternative to funding his controversial wall project would be total separation from Mexico – including making US car companies pull out their factories based on the other side of the frontier.<\/p>\n

The threat yet again upped the ante in a political dispute that has led to a partial shutdown<\/a> of the United States government and seems set to dominate the start to the third year of Trump’s presidency.<\/p>\n

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We will be forced to close the Southern Border entirely if the Obstructionist Democrats do not give us the money to finish the Wall & also change the ridiculous immigration laws that our Country is saddled with. Hard to believe there was a Congress & President who would approve!<\/p>\n

\u2014 Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 28, 2018<\/a>\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

“We will be forced to close the Southern Border entirely if the Obstructionist Democrats do not give us the money to finish the Wall,” Trump tweeted<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Trump said he would then take US-Mexican relations back to the days before the NAFTA<\/a> agreement opened free trade across Canada, Mexico and the US.<\/p>\n

That would “bring our car industry back into the United States where it belongs,” he said.<\/p>\n

It was not clear how separating the two huge neighbours would work. Bilateral trade totalled an estimated $615.9bn in 2017, according to US government figures.<\/p>\n

Neither did Trump make any mention of the new free trade agreement, known as the USMCA<\/a>, which he only recently signed with the two neighbouring countries to replace NAFTA and which he has repeatedly praised as a huge boost for American commerce.<\/p>\n

Democrats and some Republicans view the wall as a costly, unneeded and ineffective project, but some Republicans support the idea and back Trump’s demand for $5bn in partial funding.<\/p>\n

Democrats, on the other hand, have refused to approve funding and Trump, who has made hard line immigration policies a centrepiece of his presidency, has retaliated by refusing to sign off on a wider spending bill, leaving some 800,000 federal employees without pay.<\/p>\n

In Mexico, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador<\/a> sidestepped Trump’s threat, telling journalists: “We don’t want to be imprudent and we don’t think we should get into this.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\n SOURCE:
\n Al Jazeera and news agencies<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

US President Donald Trump has threatened to seal the United States-Mexico border “entirely” if Congress does not approve billions of dollars in funding for a wall. In a burst of early morning tweets on Friday, Trump said the alternative to funding his controversial wall project would be total separation from Mexico – including making US…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":27277,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27276","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-middle_east_news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27276","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27276"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27276\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/27277"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}