US government shutdown: Democrats and Republicans appear no closer to resolution as Trump says standoff could last ‘years’

Two weeks into a debilitating partial government shutdown, Donald Trump and senior Democrats are still not close to an agreement to end the standoff as the row over money for the president’s signature wall on the Mexican border deepens.

Despite more than 800,000 public workers being left unpaid and about a quarter of the federal government closed, the president has threatened to keep the partial shutdown going for “months, or even years” if he does not get the $5.6bn (£4.4bn) he has demanded for the proposed border wall.

Mr Trump “said he’d keep the government closed for a very long period of time – months or even years,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told reporters on the White House driveway after a meeting between congressional leadership and the president on Friday.

Mr Trump, during a subsequent press conference in the Rose Garden, confirmed the comments.

“Absolutely I said that,” Mr Trump said during the press conference, in which he also suggested that he could use emergency powers to divert funding for the border wall from other parts of the federal government if necessary. “I don’t think it will, but I’m prepared.”

The Friday meeting marked the first summit between congressional leaders and Mr Trump since Democrats officially regained control of the House of Representatives, ending two years of unified Republican control of the White House and Congress.

“It was a great meeting. It may get solved, it may not get solved”, Mr Trump told reporters afterwards.

House speaker Nancy Pelosi – who was voted into her leadership role by her Democratic caucus on Thursday – appeared less impressed with the progress that was made.

“We are committed to keeping our border safe,” Ms Pelosi said on the White House driveway, suggesting she and other Democrats would work with the president on border security if the government is reopened. “We can do that best when government is open. We made that clear to the president.”

Mr Trump forced the government into a partial shutdown two weeks ago by announcing that he would veto any funding legislation put on his desk that did not contain over $5bn in border wall funding. That marked a reversal from messaging from his White House staff earlier in the week who said that he would not use the continued operation of the US government as a tool to force Congress to sign off on his policy priorities.

Hundreds of thousands of federal workers have been told to stay home or show up to work without pay in the two weeks since funding lapsed on portions of the US government, leaving those individuals with little clue when they might begin seeing paychecks again and advisories to tell landlords about their difficult situations.

After retaking control of the House on Thursday, Democrats introduced a funding bill that ignored Mr Trump’s request for border wall funding, and instead focused funding on border security.

During his remarks in the Rose Garden, Mr Trump noted that he had discussed border security with the Democrats he had met with just moments earlier in the White House. He said that they had agreed that there should be ramped up security in America’s ports of entry, but insisted that human traffickers and drug smugglers were simply bypassing those entry points by going through unguarded portions of the border.

Democrats, for their part, have offered as much as $1.3bn in funding for border security, but have been rebuffed by the president and Republicans.

But, after introducing their border funding bill on Thursday evening, at least two Republican senators – Maine’s Susan Collins and Colorado’s Cory Gardner – both said it is time to end the shutdown, with or without funding for Mr Trump’s wall.

But other Republicans have repeatedly pointed to an incident on America’s southern border when tear gas was fired at 150 migrants on New Year’s Day, something they said justified Mr Trump’s refusal to back down from his request for billions to build a border wall.

Negotiations are expected to continue through the weekend between congressional representatives and the White House.