Eighteen days into the government shutdown, the Trump administration has shifted its narrative on immigration on the Southern border, amounting it to a do-or-die situation worthy of a national emergency, or as Vice President Mike Pence told reporters, a “humanitarian and national security crisis.”
While Democrats acknowledge there’s work to be done on border security, they aren’t buying into the administration’s story that the border wall is worth a shutdown.
About 800,000 federal employees will not get paid this week, the first paycheck they’ll miss because of the shutdown. That reality of the shutdown is what Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) called Tuesday the “real crisis.”
There is no border crisis. The real crisis is that 800,000 people don’t know how they’ll pay their mortgages, pay student loans, put gas in their cars or put food on the table because of Donald Trump’s government shutdown. https://t.co/K7L52eIj1w
— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) January 8, 2019
His Tuesday tweet was a reiteration of a similar Monday one, where he said that the hundreds of thousands of federal employees are “worried about how they’ll pay their mortgages, feed their families and put gas in their cars.” He dubbed the shutdown “Trump’s shutdown” and blamed Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ala.) for not taking action. – READ MORE