Donald Trump Insists Mexico Will Pay For Border Wall, Asks Congress For $18 Billion To Cover Costs

President Donald Trump is still insisting that Mexico will foot the bill for his proposed border wall, even as reports have surfaced he has already asked members of Congress for as much as $18 billion to fund the expenditure.

“I believe Mexico will pay for the wall. I have a very good relationship with Mexico,” Trump said at a press conference at Camp David on Saturday. “But yes, in some form, Mexico will pay for the wall.”

According to The Hill.com, Trump’s designs would nearly double the amount of fencing now on the Southern border, as well as call for the additional hiring of thousands more border patrol agents and other officials to patrol it.

Trump remains adamant in his insistence that Mexico will fund the project, even though leaders there have been just as forceful in asserting they have no intentions of contributing to the funding of the project.

With his administration now in talks with Democrats about possible solutions for the now grounded Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, Trump has insisted he will not sign legislation extending protections for roughly 800,000 recipients if he does not get funding for the wall.

No fix on DACA could be even costlier for Trump than the price-tag being attached to the wall.

A recent Pew Research Center poll found that three in five Americans now already believe he has made race relations worse than they were when he moved into the White House.

Pollsters added that 60 percent figure represents a 14 percent increase from when Trump was elected president over Democratic rival Hillary Clinton in late 2016, a time when 46 percent of voters indicated they thought his election would trigger a turn for the worse in race relations.

In the latest polling, just eight percent of the 1,503 adult voters surveyed said they feel Trump has made race relations better, while 30 percent said he has made no difference.

Trump has faced lingering allegations of stoking racial tensions by stirring the emotions of his white supporters along those lines. Newsweek has reported critics have pointed to examples of that in the way Trump has routinely castigated athletes who “take a knee” to protest police brutality and the way he regularly criticizes immigrants.

Trump also turned heads when he weighed in on a neo-Nazi march held over the summer that turned deadly by reasoning there were good people “on both sides.”

Pew researchers stressed “most of the increase in negative opinions has come among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents. Presently, 25 percent of respondents say Trump has made race relations worse, while 17 percent say he has made them better and 53 percent say he has not made a difference.”