White House counsel is reviewing whether president has ability to declare a national emergency in this situation, says Pence

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

Donald Trump is to make his first Oval Office address to the nation as president to argue that an immigration crisis at the US-Mexico border requires funding for his border wall pet project – before the federal government partial shutdown can be ended.

Trump to visit US-Mexico border as showdown over wall continues Read more

Democratic party leaders Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi called for Democrats to be given equal airtime. The networks subsequently agreed and they will broadcast a rebuttal.

Trump is expected to talk for about seven minutes at 9pm east coast time. Democrats are furious at what they see as an Oval Office address, which is usually used to to announce matters of urgent national importance in a non-partisan manner, being subverted for what they see as political argument.

Negotiations between the White House and Democrats in Congress over reopening the government remained at a standstill as the partial shutdown enters its third week.

Democrats have maintained they will not support any legislation that allocates funding toward Trump’s border wall. The president has meanwhile refused to budge from his demand that the wall be built.

The president will visit the border on Thursday.

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The White House press secretary, Sarah Sanders, tweeted that Trump will use the trip to “meet with those on the front lines of the national security and humanitarian crisis”.

The Oval Office address will be carried by the main broadcast networks and cable news channels.

Previewing Trump’s comments, the vice-president, Mike Pence, told reporters: “There is a humanitarian and national security crisis” at the border.

“The passion you hear from President Trump, his determination to take this case to the American people, as he will tonight in his national broadcast from the Oval Office, comes from this president’s deep desire to do his job to protect the American people,” Pence said during an appearance on ABC’s Good Morning America on Tuesday.

Immigration experts argue otherwise, pointing out that the rate of illegal border crossings has been in decline over the past decade. Last year, the population of undocumented immigrants in the US reached a 12-year low.

Pence on Monday said Trump has yet to decide whether he will officially declare a national emergency over his demand for a wall along the south-west border – the key sticking point in negotiations over the partial government shutdown that is affecting more than 800,000 federal employees.

White House counsel is reviewing whether the president has the ability to declare a national emergency in the current situation, Pence told reporters at a media briefing on Monday. He added that the administration would prefer to secure the funding for border security from an agreement with Congress.

Declaring a national state of emergency would all but certainly invite legal challenges. Trump said there is “no doubt” he has the legal authority to declare a national emergency but said “let’s get our deal done in Congress”.

The shutdown, which has lasted 17 days, is already the second-longest in US history and would become the longest if it stretches into this weekend.

Negotiations between Democratic congressional leaders and the White House are at a stalemate. Both sides have dug in over the wall after fraught meetings last week. Nancy Pelosi has called the wall “immoral” and refuses to budge on providing taxpayers’ funding for it.

As a first act, the newly empowered House Democrats passed legislation last week to reopen the government while congressional leaders and the administration continued to debate border security. But the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, a Republican from Kentucky, said he would not take up legislation the president did not support.

In 2010, Barack Obama used his first Oval Office address as president to lay out his response to the catastrophic BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. He returned to the format that same year to announce the end of US combat operations in Iraq and only once more, in 2015, to discuss terrorism.

The Oval Office has been used for such historic moments as John F Kennedy discussing the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and Lyndon B Johnson declaring in 1968 that he would not seek re-election. Richard Nixon memorably announced his resignation as president from the Oval Office following the Watergate scandal in 1974.