UPDATE: Trump speech gets mixed reaction from Texas family

WASHINGTON

President Donald Trump’s Oval Office speech has received a mixed reaction among one family who gathered to watch it in South Texas, a short distance from the U.S.-Mexico border.

Inside a home in Edinburg, 67-year-old Mexican-American Sylvia Ramirez took notes during Trump’s speech and the response by Democratic leaders. Afterward, Ramirez said, she thought Trump had expressed compassion. But, she added, “I wish he’d meant it.”

Ramirez is a Democrat who opposes a border wall.

Her 70-year-old cousin Rita Jackson-Vega supports the president and said afterward that she believed Trump was trying his best.

While many people in South Texas oppose Trump’s immigration priorities, Jackson-Vega said some action was necessary to curb illegal immigration, though she also believes a wall wouldn’t stop families from trying to enter the United States.

Making another pitch to fulfill his signature campaign promise of building a wall at the Mexican border, Trump argued that building a southern border wall would be an act of “love.”

.

He suggested that other people, including rich liberals, build walls around their homes “not because they hate the people outside but because they love the people inside.”

He has previously claimed that the Vatican and former President Barack Obama built walls for security, but there is no wall around Obama’s Washington home.

The debate over funding for his physical barrier has been at the center of a partial federal government shutdown, now in its third week..

In the Democratic response to Trump’s address, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said Trump should reopen government while talks continue over the U.S.-Mexico border wall because there’s “no excuse for hurting millions of Americans.”

Schumer says Democrats and Republicans agree on the need to secure borders. But the New York Democrat says the “symbol of America should be the Statue of Liberty, not a 30-foot wall.”

Schumer noted that Trump had promised to have Mexico pay for the wall. But having failed, Trump is now “unable to convince Congress or the American people to foot the bill,” he said.

“American democracy doesn’t work that way. We don’t govern by temper tantrum,” Schumer says,

He was joined by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who said the president has “chosen fear” in making the case to the American people for the border wall and Democrats “want to start with the facts.”

“We all agree that we need to secure our borders,” she said.

She noted that the House passed legislation to reopen government on the first day of the new Congress. But Trump rejects that legislation because it doesn’t have funding for his border wall.

“The fact is," she said, "President Trump must stop holding the American people hostage, must stop manufacturing a crisis, and must reopen the government.”

The president's televised plea for border wall funding sought an edge in the shutdown battle with congressional Democrats as he declared there is “a humanitarian crisis, a crisis of the heart and a crisis of the soul.”

Addressing the nation from the Oval Office for the first time, Trump argued for funding on security and humanitarian grounds as he sought to put pressure on newly empowered Democrats amid an extended partial government shutdown.

Trump called on Democrats to return to the White House to meet with him, saying it was “immoral” for “politicians to do nothing.”

Trump, who has long railed against illegal immigration at the border, has recently seized on humanitarian concerns to argue there is a broader crisis that can only be solved with a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. But critics say the security risks are overblown and his administration is at least partly to blame for the humanitarian situation.

Trump has been discussing the idea of declaring a national emergency to allow him to circumvent Congress and move forward with the wall. But he made no mention of such a declaration Tuesday night.

Democrats have repeatedly vowed to block funding for a wall, which they say would be immoral and ineffective, and have called on Trump to reopen shuttered portions of the government while border negotiations continue.