Trump pledges $2 billion to Mexico border wall in budget proposal

As the Austin-based investigative news publication the Texas Observer reported this week, residents and land owners are continuing to receive notices from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) stating that the agency wants to condemn land in order to move forward on the border wall.

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“The next question is going to be: How many miles of wall will that build?” But the request threatens to shutter the entire federal government.

The wall is projected to cost a little over $21 billion.

But by asking for border wall funding in a Defense Department supplemental request for fiscal 2017, the Trump administration is setting up a major clash with Senate Democrats. “We won’t just appropriate money and have the plan TBD”.

“I say all great things start with one small step”, says Bartlett with the Berkeley City Council. Any delay that lasts beyond April 28 will lead to a shutdown of the department.

FILE – A Guatemalan woman stands inside a dormitory in a federal detention facility for undocumented immigrant mothers and children in Artesia, N.M., September 10, 2014. “We have protected the core diplomatic function of State”. In recent months the company’s stock hit eight-year highs as investors contemplated what the wall project-and other infrastructure work proposed by Trump, such as roads and tunnels-would mean for its bottom line. The White House is unveiling the president’s budget priorities on Thursday.

Gonzalez also said that Trump’s proposal would increase the DHS budget to $43.8 billion for fiscal year 2018, which is about six percent compared to the previous year. In other words, increasing spending on the wall will require cuts somewhere else.

“This is a hard-power budget”.

At FEMA, the budget slices $667 million in cuts to state and local grants, like the Pre-Disaster Mitigation Grant Program, which the Office of Management and Budget said doesn’t have congressional authority.

House Homeland Security Chairman Michael McCaul of Texas was far more literal in a Fox News op-ed article he published December 2.

That doesn’t make the funding for the wall safe. Democrats loathe the idea of the wall.

Of course, the federal government can not simply take the land.

“You could have five or ten 30-foot concrete walls and if there is no electronic security or surveillance they will get past every one of those”, said Cameron owner of Border Wall Builders LLC.

A team of five American-Statesman reporters and photographers traveled almost the entire length of the Texas-Mexico border to examine how the existing border fence is affecting communities in the Rio Grande Valley, and to study the impact the coming border wall might have. And Cornyn anxious that paying for it would add to the country’s growing debt. It was titled, “Yes, we will build a wall, put Mexico on a “payment plan” and enforce the law”. But the Mexican government has emphatically rejected no American politicians, of any political stripe, appears to be buying it, either.