White House press secretary Sarah Sanders compared proposals for border security that don’t include President Trump’s wall to flying on a plane with only one wing.
“I’d never want to get on an airplane with only one wing,” Sanders said in an interview on CNN when asked if Trump would accept a bill that provided billions for border security without the physical barrier.
“The president wants to make sure we’re actually securing the border in a totality, not just with one wing,” she said. “You need two wings. Which means You have to have a wall. You have to have technology. You have to have all of the things that the president has put forward in his proposal.”
[Also read: Sarah Sanders: Stone indictment has ‘nothing to do with the president’]
Sarah Sanders on CNN this morning compared border security with no wall to an airplane with only one wing.
“The President wants to make sure that we are actually securing the border in a totality.” pic.twitter.com/BIvs7u2Ag0
— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) January 25, 2019
The partial government shutdown, by far the longest in U.S. history, has been in effect for more than a month, and on Friday hundreds of thousands of federal workers missed their second paycheck of the shutdown.
President Trump says that he will not sign a bill to reopen the government unless it includes $5.7 billion in funding for the border wall, and Democrats are standing their ground as well, saying they will not agree to a bill that has money allocated for a physical barrier at the southern border.
“The only reason they [Democrats] don’t want to support this is simply because they care more about politics than they do about this country,” Sanders said. “And at some point they’ve got to make a decision if they are going to put our country first and the people in the country ahead of their own political games.”
Sanders said that Trump is not “hung up on the wall,” but is committed to protecting the country and those in it, and therefore will not accept a bill that does not fully protect U.S. citizens from threats coming from the border, including drugs, human trafficking, and other crimes.
“The wall is part of the process because you can’t just fix one piece of the problem,” Sanders said.
