WASHINGTON -- Faced with a looming deadline to prevent another government shutdown, lawmakers on Friday moved toward a border-security deal that would fall well short of President Donald Trump's demand for $5.7 billion in funds for a wall at the southern border.
On Capitol Hill, House and Senate conferees were nearing an agreement that could offer the president between $1.3 billion and around $2 billion in funding for border security. The amount, still subject to change, could include some physical barriers and result in a deal as early as Monday. Talk of a wall has given way to "bollard fencing" and strategic placements.
"We're 95 [percent] to 98 percent done," said Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee.
Trump has told allies that he would grudgingly accept a figure of about $2 billion, but House Democrats remain publicly opposed to spending that much on physical barriers. It is still not clear how much of the final allocation would go toward new fencing, according to three people briefed on the negotiations.
"Throughout the talks, Democrats have insisted that a border-security compromise not be overly reliant on physical barriers. We will not agree to $2 billion in funding for barriers," said Evan Hollander, spokesman for the House Appropriations Committee.
Rep. Steven Palazzo, a GOP member of the House-Senate panel holding the talks, said he expects a deal "before the end of the weekend" that could be finalized on Monday. The Mississippi lawmaker said some key details are still under negotiation, including the amount of money for barriers.
Another Republican on the negotiating panel, Rep. Chuck Fleischmann of Tennessee, said the GOP wants as much barrier funding as possible, and he hopes that the final amount is above $2 billion.
Fleischmann said the chances of a government shutdown triggered by an impasse are "next to nil."
"I think there's next to no appetite in the room on either side in either body, and that's a good thing. We didn't want the government shut down the first time," he said in a Bloomberg Television interview.
The effort to find some final amount between the House Democrats' $1.3 billion and a figure slightly higher than $2 billion marks an end game of sorts for high-stakes negotiations aimed at making sure the government does not close down next weekend.
But the agreement still has contentious wrinkles to iron out.
While Democrats want as low a number as they can secure, members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, which had earlier pushed Trump to take an uncompromising line on wall funding, met with him on Thursday and indicated that a number even slightly above $2 billion would satisfy them for now.
Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, told senators at a party lunch and in private conversations over the past few days that Trump had told him, "I can live with $2 billion," according to a Senate aide who witnessed one of the exchanges. A spokesman for Lee, Conn Carroll, said the remarks were misinterpreted and that the senator was speculating about steps that could be taken to persuade the president to move below his $5.7 billion demand.
The White House has been considering accepting a deal but also using executive action to secure additional barrier funding without lawmakers' approval. That plan was described by two people familiar with White House thinking who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. Depending on what Trump does, such an action could spark lawsuits or congressional votes of disapproval.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., appeared to gesture at that Thursday, saying an accord could be "a good down payment." Graham, who is close to Trump, said that to make up the difference, "there are other ways to do it, and I expect the president to go it alone in some fashion."
Trump supporters have said there are other executive powers Trump could use to divert money from the budget to wall construction, though it was unclear whether such steps would face challenges in Congress or the courts. One provision of the law lets the Defense Department provide support to counter drug activities.
Beyond the dollar amount, negotiators remain far apart on detention beds under the control of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to house families detained at the border with Mexico. Funds currently allocated are enough for 40,520 detention beds. Democrats asked to limit the number of beds to 35,520 for the remainder of the fiscal year and to increase funds for alternatives to the practice of family detention. Republicans want substantially more beds.
With disputes like that, Democratic aides on Friday downplayed the likelihood of a quick deal; their last official offer on funding for barriers was a little over $500 million -- although privately they acknowledge they are likely to go higher.
Regardless of where the talks land, the funding levels under discussion mark a compromise for Trump as he struggles to fulfill his campaign promise that he would build a wall at the southern border. In December, he publicly dismissed a proposal for $2.5 billion as insufficient, undercutting Vice President Mike Pence, who had floated the prospect by Democrats.
Leahy, a member of the bipartisan House-Senate committee negotiating the deal, declined to elaborate on specific numbers or what was left to negotiate, citing the need to keep the details of ongoing talks private.
"It's easy to have the rhetoric about the border," he said. "It's the realism that's difficult."
Leahy said that he, along with staff and other lawmakers on the 17-member committee, planned to stay in Washington this weekend to negotiate the final details and prepare to sign off on it Monday. Because of procedural rules in the House, it is seen as the last possible day for lawmakers to unveil a deal that would prevent a government shutdown ahead of the deadline.
Over the past several days, negotiators have begun discussing the potential placement of new barriers -- some of them likely to consist of sturdy, steel slats known as bollard fencing -- in specific locations on the border that have seen significant increases in illegal crossings, according to two Republican aides.
"The walls we saw were really heavy fences," said Rep. Kay Granger of Texas, the ranking Republican on the House Appropriations Committee, describing a trip to the border she took earlier this week. She told reporters that after speaking with border patrol agents, she would support bollard fencing on sections of the border.
"There's no one that said we should put a solid wall across our southern border," she said.
On Thursday, Richard Shelby of Alabama, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, told fellow Republicans that a one-on-one meeting with Trump in the Oval Office earlier in the week left him optimistic.
"I think we are going to get a deal," Shelby said, according to one of the attendees.
Information for this article was contributed by Emily Cochrane and Annie Karni of The New York Times; by Alan Fram, Andrew Taylor, Lisa Mascaro, Jill Colvin and Catherine Lucey of The Associated Press; and by Erik Wasson, Jack Fitzpatrick and Terrence Dopp of Bloomberg News.
A Section on 02/09/2019