Trump to hold rally near border

With a partial government shutdown looming at the end of the week, President Donald Trump will hold a rally in El Paso, Texas, on Monday evening to demand a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border. It will be the president’s first political rally of 2019.

Potential 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke, a former U.S. congressman from Texas, plans to hold a protest march and rally, dubbed “March for Truth,” just a few miles away, starting at the same time. O’Rourke has argued that Trump misrepresented the situation in El Paso. In his State of the Union Address last week, Trump claimed that crime in El Paso had dropped due to a “powerful barrier in place.”

Trump said Sunday he doubted negotiators on Capitol Hill would come up with a budget solution in time to prevent another shutdown. “I don’t think the Dems on the Border Committee are being allowed by their leaders to make a deal,” he tweeted. “They are offering very little money for the desperately needed Border Wall & now, out of the blue, want a cap on convicted violent felons to be held in detention!”

The bipartisan committee of negotiators hit snags over the weekend. Democrats want to cap the number of spaces available to detain migrants at 16,500. They said the cap would force Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to deport criminals more quickly without allowing family separations. Republicans do not want to limit how many criminals ICE can detain. Another point of contention is the amount of money that will go toward some kind of physical barrier. The White House has demanded $5.7 billion, while Democrats on the committee are reportedly requesting somewhere closer to $1.6 billion.

Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said Sunday that Trump will not rule out another shutdown or declaring a national emergency. “You cannot take a shutdown off the table, and you cannot take [$5.7 billion] off the table.” He said Trump would be willing to sign off on something that is “in the middle.”

Funding for parts of the government runs out Friday at midnight.