WASHINGTON, Feb. 5 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President Donald Trump said he will get a U.S.-Mexico border wall built when delivering his State of the Union address Tuesday night, as he's trying to strike a unifying tone facing a divided Congress and a bitter fight over the wall funding.
"In the past, most of the people in this room voted for a wall -- but the proper wall never got built. I'll get it built," Trump told a joint session of Congress in the House of Representatives.
He said the border wall with Mexico will be "a smart, strategic, see-through steel barrier -- not just a simple concrete wall," adding that "it will be deployed in the areas identified by border agents as having the greatest need."
The lack of agreement between the White House and Congressional Democrats over whether to provide billions of U.S. dollars for a border wall along the U.S.-Mexico border had led to a record 35-day partial government shutdown, which ended temporarily on Jan. 25.
A group of bipartisan lawmakers are negotiating a deal on border security, with a deadline of Feb. 15, to try to avoid another partial government shutdown.
Trump urged Republicans and Democrats to "join forces" to confront what he's calling "an urgent national crisis." Democrats have rejected the idea of a border wall, slamming it as expensive, ineffective and "immoral."
The president, when addressing the nation, made no reference to the national emergency he has threatened to declare if Democrats fail to provide money for funding his desired wall.
Such a declaration would enable him to bypass congressional approval and redirect funds already allocated by Congress for other purposes, possibly at the Pentagon, to the border wall but set to draw political backlash and court challenges and risk disunity of the Republican Party.
If Trump does not declare a national emergency while the Democrats again fail to provide funding for the envisaged border wall before Feb. 15, the government will be partially shut down again.
