House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Thursday she could support a border security deal that adds new Normandy fencing along about 30 miles of open border.
But she won’t bring a bill to the floor that includes Trump’s vision for a wall or steel-slat barrier, she said.
“There is not going to be any wall money in the legislation,” Pelosi told reporters Thursday. Pelosi controls the House floor, and her approval of a border security deal is required for legislation to make it to the president’s desk by a Feb. 15 deadline.
Pelosi said she’d back Normandy fencing used to finish approximately 700 miles authorized by the 2006 Secure Fence Act. A 2017 government report determined about 50 miles of that authorized fencing are incomplete, although Republicans have put forward higher estimates. Pelosi said only 30 miles are incomplete.
[Related: ‘A WALL is a WALL’: Trump mocks Congress for talking about fences, barriers]
Normandy fencing includes movable barriers that allow vehicles to pass through and the barriers are low enough to climb over. Pelosi said that’s as far as she’ll go on a barrier.
“If the president wants to call that a wall, he can call it a wall,” Pelosi said. “Are there places where enhanced fencing, Normandy fencing, will work? Let them have that discussion.”
Pelosi said hundreds of miles of border don’t require barriers because of cliffs and rivers.
A border security deal hinges on a bipartisan group of 17 House and Senate lawmakers who met for the first time Wednesday to try to hammer out an agreement. The group has until Feb. 15, when a short-term funding measure expires and a quarter of the federal government would be partially shuttered for a second time this year.
Senate Republican and Democrat appropriators agreed last summer to provide $1.6 billion for 65 miles of pedestrian fencing in the Rio Grande Valley, which the GOP said could be used as a starting point in the negotiations.
House Democrats on Wednesday pitched their own border security plan, and it did not include money for any wall of barrier. President Trump has indicated that he won’t sign legislation without wall funding.
