US: Indian origin senator Kamala Harris, Congressman Ro Khanna ask Trump to end shutdown

Kamala Harris criticised Trump and called the shutdown a "crisis of the President's own making", while Khanna denounced his plans to declare a national emergency to build a border wall.

Images: AFP/ Twitter

Washington: Indian American Congressman Ro Khanna has asked President Donald Trump to end the ongoing government shutdown and denounced his plans to declare a national emergency to build a border wall. As the partial government shutdown entered 19th day on Wednesday, making it the second-longest in the US history, the California Democrat, in a series of tweets, talked about the implications of the shutdown and how it is affecting Americans, reports The American Bazaar. "Trump may want to declare a 'national emergency' to sidestep Congress and build a border wall. The real 'national emergency' is that young Americans are drowning in student debt, families are forced into bankruptcy due to health costs & millions of our citizens are left behind," Khanna, who represents California's 17th district, said in the tweet. The Congressman, who has been very vocal about his views on building the wall on the US-Mexico border, had described in December that issue was a manufactured crisis and said it was a "15th century concept". "Not only did Trump leave hundreds of thousands of federal workers without pay for the holidays due to the shutdown, but he's also frozen their 2019 pay increase. Can someone please tell me how this will grow the economy?... End this shutdown now," he said in another tweet on Wednesday. In a CNN interview also on Wednesday, Indian-American Senator Kamala Harris criticised Trump and called the shutdown a "crisis of the President's own making". She spoke about how her heritage as the daughter of immigrants from India and Jamaica has shaped her outlook on the plight of immigrants under the policies of the Trump administration. Khanna and Harris' remarks comes a day after Trump in a prime-time address to the nation appealed to the American people to pressure legislators to fund the border wall he wants and end the government shutdown.