Trump threatens to 'close up our country' over border security

Associated Press/Manuel Balce Ceneta

President Donald Trump speaks about tax reform at the Cleveland Public Auditorium and Conference Center in Cleveland, Ohio, Saturday, May 5, 2018.

• President Donald Trump threatened to "close up our country" to handle illegal immigration and border security.
• He made the remarks at a tax reform roundtable in Ohio on Saturday.
• He blasted Democrats for refusing to support his border wall and said "we're going to get the wall, even if we have to think about closing up the country for awhile."

President Donald Trump suggested Saturday that his administration will "have to think about closing up the country" over border security.

Trump made the remarks at a tax reform roundtable in Ohio, and slammed Democrats for refusing to back his long-promised wall along the US-Mexico border.

"They don't want the wall, but we're going to get the wall, even if we have to think about closing up the country for awhile," Trump said. "We're going to get the wall. We have no choice. We have absolutely no choice. And we're going to get tremendous security in our country."

It wasn't clear what exactly Trump meant by "closing up the country," though he recently threatened a government shutdown for September if Congress continued to refuse to fund the wall.

Trump's remarks also came as his administration attempts to handle the roughly 200 central American migrants who traveled through Mexico as part of a "caravan" last month, intending to seek asylum in the US.

Though Trump had warned that the migrants "had better be stopped" before they reached the US-Mexico border, 228 were eventually allowed to set foot on US soil and apply for asylum, BuzzFeed News reported on Friday.

"We may have to close up our country to get this straight, because we either have a country or we don't," Trump said Saturday. "And you can't allow people to pour into our country the way they're doing."