(Image source from: www.sputniknews.com)

President Donald Trump has announced on Monday that he would be “building the wall anyway”.

while referring to setting up a barrier on the United States-Mexico border at a rally in El Paso he said: “We’ll be building the wall anyway. They (Congressmen) say that progress has been made. I said: ‘Wait a minute, I gotta take care of my people from Texas, I’ve got to go, I don’t even wanna hear about it.’ So I don’t know what they mean (when they say) ‘progress has been made,” Trump said, according to Sputnik.

The announcement by Trump comes after Congressional negotiators announced that “an agreement in principle” had been reached on funding for border security, with more than USD 1.3 billion assigned for the barrier alone, reports Fox News.

Trump had earlier asked for a budget allocation of USD five billion to build the U.S.-Mexico border wall.

An impasse between the U.S. Congress and Trump over funding for the wall had earlier triggered the longest-ever partial government shutdown in the U.S., which lasted for 35 days consequently leaving scores of federal workers without pay for the period.

Currently, a stop-gap measure is in place until February 15, during which negotiators are trying to clinch a deal that would keep away from plunging the U.S. back into the state of shutdown over again.

-Sowmya Sangam