President Trump addresses nation on border wall crisis

United States President Donald Trump made a case for a wall on the border with Mexico in a televised address on Tuesday, saying the situation is a “humanitarian crisis a crisis of the heart and a crisis of the soul”. 

The address came before a rebuttal by top Democrats, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, who said the president “has appealed to fear, not facts”.  

According to Aljazeera, the speeches came on the 18th day of a partial government shutdown, centered on Trump’s demand for more than $5bn in wall funding, a request Democrats vehemently oppose.

“This is a choice between right and wrong; between justice and injustice,” Trump said in his first address from the Oval Office. Urging Democrats to return to the White House to meet for talks, Trump said it was “immoral” for “politicians to do nothing”. 

In the Democratic rebuttal, Pelosi said Trump “must stop holding the American people hostage, must stop manufacturing a crisis and must re-open the government”.

Trump cited cases of American citizens “savagely murdered in cold blood” by undocumented immigrants.

“How much more American blood will be shed before Congress does its job?” he asked.

He also said the wall was needed to stop the flow of drugs that kill many Americans each year.

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“Every week, 300 of our citizens are killed by heroin alone – 90 percent of which floods across from our southern border. More Americans will die from drugs this year than were killed in the entire Vietnam War.”

Rubintino Sanchez, a migrant from Mexico, challenged Trump’s assertions that most migrants coming into the country are law-breakers.

“We aren’t criminals. The three or four examples he mentioned, but it doesn’t mean much. He doesn’t explain whether the drugs these Hispanic people consumed turned them into criminals or not.”

Despite several attempts at talks, Trump and his fellow Republicans and Democrats have so far failed to find to a deal on the funding, and Tuesday’s speeches deepened the feeling that politicians are still far from finding a solution.

The partial shutdown, which began on December 22, affects some 800,000 federal workers in nine departments and several agencies. Employees have either been furloughed or are required to work without pay.

The shutdown has also strained the immigration system, worsening backlogs in courts and complicating hiring for employers.