President Donald Trump, pictured here with Vice President Mike Pence, has long described the project as a wall, though more recently he has said he could accept a slatted steel fence. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Immigration Trump will bring top White House lawyer to Mexican border The unusual move is the latest sign that Trump is seriously weighing a national emergency declaration to secure border wall funds.

President Donald Trump is set to visit the southern border in Texas on Thursday to make his case for building a border wall. And in the latest sign that he is considering extreme legal measures to secure funding for the project, he’ll be accompanied by an unusual guest: the White House’s top attorney.

As an expert in constitutional law, White House counsel Pat Cipollone is at the center of the administration’s internal debate over whether and how Trump can unilaterally direct billions of dollars in funding to the project, which has become the subject of a partial government shutdown now into its third week.


With Democrats in Congress adamantly refusing to allocate budget dollars to a wall or steel fence along the entire U.S.-Mexico border, Trump has directed Cipollone to explore legal ways to find the money without them. Cipollone and other administration lawyers have been urging caution.

The options include using Trump’s extraordinary power to declare a “national emergency” that would give him access to billions in military budget funds, although critics say the move would quickly face challenges in court.

It is Cipollone’s first major test in his new job, which he started just over a month ago, replacing former White House counsel Don McGahn. His travel to Texas with Trump was confirmed by two sources familiar with the planning of the trip, who said he was going along to advise on legal strategy.

“The border visit was initially conceived as more of a public relations play, but if Trump gets a briefing that can confirm, or add to the sense of the crisis, then it can be part of that legal and policy record the administration will end up using in court,” said one Republican close to the White House.

At the border, Trump is expected to receive a briefing and meet with men and women who work on the ground, said one White House official. Both Sens. Ted Cruz and John Cornyn of Texas are expected to travel with him, the official added.

Trump is not expected to give another speech like his Tuesday primetime television address but will almost surely deliver unscripted remarks to reporters. But the visit is part of the White House’s broader strategy to lay the foundation for Trump to potentially take some kind of executive action that will allow him to unlock the $5.7 billion he seeks to build that wall without Congress’s help.

Trump will visit a day before federal workers — many of whom are still required to report to work — will miss their first paychecks.

Tuesday’s primetime address from the Oval Office was meant to kick off a new phase of Trump’s public messaging strategy, say close Trump advisers, even as the White House internally fine-tunes the legal argument for unilateral action. Thursday’s border visit will aim to make vivid Trump’s argument that illegal immigration has reached a crisis level warranting extreme action without Congress, which typically controls government spending.

Trump has long described the project as a wall, though more recently he has said he could accept a slatted steel fence.

"The president is taking his giant megaphone down to the border and that is a really effective way to communicate to Americans the visual problem of border security. He described the problem in a very cerebral way from the Oval Office, and now he's going to show the problem from the border,” said veteran Republican strategist Ron Bonjean.

Trump lawyers and Office of Management and Budget officials are currently exploring three options to find the additional money. One is through the declaration of a national emergency. Some Trump advisers had urged him to mention that possibility during Tuesday night’s address, but he did not.

“I think we might work a deal, and if we don’t we might go that [emergency] route,” Trump told reporters on Wednesday, adding that he has the “absolute right” to declare an emergency if no deal materializes.

The other two options include invoking a legal statute that allows the Department of Defense to respond to law enforcement agencies seeking help; or utilizing disaster relief funds managed by the Army Corps of Engineers.

“There are several different tools in the tool box — though no decisions have been made yet,” said a second Republican close to the White House. The Republican indicated that Trump will likely take unilateral action later this week if meetings he is holding with congressional leaders on Wednesday fail to make progress towards a deal.

Trump is slated to attend a lunch on Wednesday with Republican senators on Capitol Hill and then meet later in the afternoon with congressional leaders.

He will travel to the border to McAllen, Texas, on Thursday afternoon, along with Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, and senior adviser Jared Kushner. According to local media, Trump will visit a city park "frequently patrolled by Border Patrol agents attempting to intercept those crossing into the country illegally."

McAllen does not currently have a border wall, only some fenced areas along the Rio Grande River, which acts as a natural barrier. Last fall the federal government awarded a contract to a Texas company to build a six-mile-long concrete wall in the Rio Grande Valley, similar to the wall along the border in California.

Some immigration hardliners such as Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies have argued that the area really needs camera towers and better paved roads that run parallel to the river, less sexy items he has said than an actual wall.

Not all local officials are sold on Trump’s theory of a crisis at the border.

“There's a misconception that the wall will solve the major problem of what is conceived as a crisis on the border. And that's the hundreds of people a day that are coming across seeking asylum,” McAllen Mayor Jim Darling said during a CNN interview on Wednesday. “What really caused the crisis in 2014 has continued to be a crisis at least from a political standpoint has been asylum seekers. That's why I'm saying that I don't think a wall necessarily solves that particular problem.”

Some House members who represent Texas border towns are not expected to join Trump, including Rep. Will Hurd (R-Texas), whose spokesman said he will instead support Democratic measures to re-open the parts of the federal government that have closed.

"He has a job to do here. He has votes. That's what the voters of the Texas 23rd district sent him here to do,” said Katie Thompson, a spokesperson for Hurd. “He's definitely going to vote for individual appropriations bills."

Trump has visited the U.S.-Mexico border several times already. During his campaign in July 2015, Trump’s 757 landed in Laredo, Texas where he met with a local chapter of the National Border Patrol Council and walked around the town in a white “Make America Great Again” baseball cap — "despite the great danger" it presented to him, as he claimed at the time.

In August 2017, Trump visited a U.S. Marine Corps base that doubles as a major hub for U.S. Customs and Border Protection in Yuma, Arizona. It was at a rally in Phoenix that evening that Trump first suggested he might pardon the controversial former Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was convicted of criminal contempt linked to his treatment of undocumented immigrants.

Trump last visited the border in March 2018, when he toured more than a half-dozen wall prototypes in the California desert near Tijuana. It was his first presidential visit to the solid blue state since taking office, and his third time meeting with U.S. Customs and Border Protection personnel on their turf.

His visit to the Texas border comes just weeks after U.S. troops left the area, where they had temporarily been deployed to assist with an approaching migrant caravan. The deployment caused angst among city officials who were never consulted beforehand, and who felt that stationing troops there contributed to the misperception that towns like McAllen are "dangerous and lawless,” Darling said at the time.

Those same border towns are now dealing with the impact of the government shutdown and grappling with the potential economic consequences of a closed border.

As one result of the shutdown, the primary spokesperson for Border Patrol's McAllen station could not be reached ahead of Trump's visit. "We are currently out of the office due to the federal funding hiatus. I will not be able to access or return... messages at this time," her voicemail stated Tuesday afternoon.

Daniel Lippman and Rebecca Morin contributed reporting.