What’s actually happening at the US-Mexico border, explained
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
What’s actually happening at the US-Mexico border, explained
Dara Lind January 08, 2019
President Trump wants you, and everyone else in America, to believe that the US-Mexico border isn’t just in trouble but in crisis .
The fundamental premise of the government shutdown is that the US-Mexico border is so dangerous to human life that it is worth shutting down whole swaths of the federal government, forcing 800,000 federal employees to miss paychecks, in order to address it.
“Beyond the 800,000 federal workers — all the good Americans and great families that we’re very sensitive to — is the tens of millions of Americans who are deeply troubled about the widening crisis on our southern border,” Vice President Mike Pence said on Monday when a reporter asked him about furloughed federal workers.
And, of course, the way to solve the crisis, Trump will argue in a speech at 9 pm Eastern Tuesday, is to give the federal government $5.7 billion to build about 250 more miles of physical barrier along the border — or for Trump declare a “national emergency” to find the money and start building it without Congress’s input.
Most of Trump’s claims about the border are fever-dream fantasies that people who actually live there don’t recognize. But some of them have grains of truth: In one respect — the number of children and families entering the US — what we’re seeing is genuinely unprecedented.
Still, a shutdown-worthy crisis, much less a “national emergency,” is a rare and dire thing. A crisis may require immediate attention and a national debate to determine the best course of action, but it may not require that everything else grind to a halt. And not everything that is going wrong, or less than perfectly, is a crisis.
This is the most important thing to remember about the US-Mexico border and the Trump administration’s claims about it. Even if you believe that no one should come to the US without papers, or believe that too many asylum seekers are released into the country — or, conversely, if you believe the Trump administration’s treatment of children and families crossing the border is a national outrage — that isn’t the same as believing it’s a crisis worth shutting down the government for, or a national emergency worth the seizing of executive power.
To make that judgment, don’t start with what Trump says about the border. Start with what’s true.
1) The border panic has very little to do with what people who live on the border actually see
It’s certainly true that some Americans (though probably not tens of millions) are so worried about gang members and criminals coming over the border to kill them that they are willing to shut down the government over it. But the people who actually live on the border aren’t asking for any of this.
Because Trump has worked so tirelessly to reenforce the theme that Republicans will protect you from criminal immigrants while Democrats will abandon you to them, the easiest way to gauge whether border residents agree is to look at election results.
The 2018 midterm elections — when Trump, ignoring the advice of other Republicans, hammered relentlessly on border security in the last weeks of the campaign — resulted in Republicans losing two seats along the US-Mexico border, one in Arizona and one in New Mexico. In the current Congress, the only Republican representing a district along the border is Texas Rep. Will Hurd, an outspoken moderate on immigration who says his opposition to a border wall is the reason he won reelection.
In fact, as of 2017 (according to the Pew Research Center ), people who lived less than 350 miles from the border were the least likely to support Trump’s wall. In other words, the people supposedly on the front lines of what Trump calls a crisis are those least inclined to support the proposed solution to it.
People who live along the border are used to politicians — at both the local and state level — fearmongering about their hometowns. One Texas sheriff spoke out in 2014 to discourage politicians in his state government from hyping the border threat too much — they appreciated the extra money but worried it would hurt their tourism industry . “A lot of tourists will call up to my office and say, ‘Is it safe out there?’” the sheriff, Ronny Dodson, told Chris Hooks at the time. “We’ll ask where they’re coming from. They’ll say ‘Houston.’ We’ll say, hurry up and get out of there! It’s safer here than where you’re coming from.”
The political rhetoric is feeding real fear — among people who live far from the border. But people who live closer to it simply don’t identify with that. That’s an important perspective to keep in mind in regards to not only Trump’s claims about the lawlessness of the border, but also how the American people see this as a crisis someone needs to step in to solve.
2) The US has more than 600 miles of border barriers — and 20-plus years of uninterrupted buildup
The US has been increasing security on its southern border since the 1990s. (Trump’s attorney general nominee William Barr engaged in some of this buildup the last time he was AG, under George H.W. Bush.)
Border Patrol has expanded radically. Wave after wave of surveillance projects have been thrown at the border in the hopes of spotting every person or thing coming over. And across 650 miles of the border, even before Trump got into office, there was some form of physical barrier — from Vietnam-surplus landing mats to the steel bollards, or “slats,” Trump now favors for his wall as well.
Physical border barriers first came into use in urban areas, like San Diego and El Paso, where it was hard for Border Patrol agents to spot and catch people who crossed without papers. They’ve since expanded to other areas where large numbers of people might cross in an effort to deter easy crossings.
Some activists and progressives refer to the buildup at the border as a “militarization,” and there’s something to that — living on the border means being subject to roadside checkpoints, surveillance, and (sometimes) a fence through your backyard. Before Trump, both Democrats and Republicans were eager to increase border security at the drop of a hat. The effect (along with the related phenomena of violence on the Mexican side of the border) has been a transformation of border communities from cross-border exchanges to citadels.
When he was running for president, Trump had a ready rebuttal to this: He wasn’t just talking about a fence, but a real, honest-to-goodness wall. But after two years of actually being president, and having an administration that knows what’s feasible to construct and what Border Patrol agents actually prefer, his administration is exclusively building barriers out of steel bollards — the construction style that was the gold standard for barrier construction even before Trump.
Trump can continue to call it a “steel wall,” but what his administration is really proposing is updating and expanding an existing system of barriers, not creating a thing that hasn’t been there before.
3) In historical context, illegal border crossings are way down
The federal government doesn’t try to estimate how many people successfully cross into the US without papers, undetected. What it does — and has done for more than half a century — is use the number of migrants its agents catch trying to enter the US between ports of entry as a proxy for how many, overall, must be trying to get through.
By that measure, the security of the US-Mexico border in fiscal year 2018 (which ended on September 30 of last year) was comparable to the early 1970s.
Unauthorized migration to the US was already on the decline before the Great Recession — probably in part because the US government started formally deporting people instead of simply turning them back, making it harder for someone to try to enter the US several times in a single year. But the recession all but killed it.
The Trump administration doesn’t present things that way. It talks about patterns of the past decade (where crossings have been roughly comparable) or simply compares 2017 to 2018. That makes 2018 seem like an alarming increase. But the reality is that 2017 was an abnormally slow year for border crossings — in part, researchers suspect, because the fear of a Trump presidency delayed some people from taking the trip.
Since numbers started ticking back up in early 2018, the Trump administration has been in a near-constant state of panic over the border. It’s the result of a bad baseline — and unreasonable expectations.
4) We are seeing unprecedented numbers of families and children coming to the US without papers
Just as important as the change in how many people are crossing into the US between ports of entry is a change in who is doing it .
Over the past several years, adults traveling with children — and children traveling alone — have made up an ever-increasing share of people apprehended at the border. (Often, “apprehended” means the migrants seek out a Border Patrol agent and turn themselves in to ask for asylum.)
The government has only been keeping separate statistics on apprehensions of families and children since 2012. The numbers we’ve seen in the past few months are a record for that (brief) period — even outpacing the peak of the “border crisis” in June 2014.
And while it might be hard to imagine that more families and children are coming to the US now than were in 2000 — when overall apprehensions were four times greater — experts say that’s exactly what’s happened. A 2017 report from the government’s Office of Immigration Statistics estimated that children and families made up less than 2 percent of border crossers during the 2003-2008 period. For the past few months, they’ve made up more than half of all apprehensions.
There are multiple reasons for this. The collapse of the unauthorized labor influx incentivized smugglers to find new markets. And they had some ready new markets in the people of the Northern Triangle of Central America (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras), who were desperate to leave gang violence and poverty. Meanwhile, adults who had already settled in the US wanted to bring the children of their family to live with them.
The result isn’t just that more of the people who are coming are children and families, but that, by the numbers, more children and families are coming than ever before. More than 150,000 children or family members were apprehended by Border Patrol in fiscal year 2018. That’s nearly 10 percent of the overall apprehensions in 2000 — and we have no reason to believe that children and families actually made up 10 percent of what used to be a migration of single adults.
Many asylum seekers like this woman and her son have been held in Tijuana while waiting to be allowed to enter the US legally to claim asylum. Thousands of others have crossed illegally because they are unable to wait.
5) The Trump administration is tragically unequipped to deal with the families and children coming in now
The US’s border infrastructure isn’t designed to take care of families or children. But that’s the role it’s been forced into. And the results have been tragic.
Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan told the Senate Judiciary Committee in December that “the infrastructure is not compatible with the reality” of who is getting apprehended — essentially admitting that his agency was ill-equipped to take care of the people currently entering the US.
Border Patrol doesn’t even have the standards for detention conditions that Immigration and Customs Enforcement has — because Border Patrol isn’t supposed to be detaining anyone for any meaningful amount of time. The problem, of course, is that the times families are being held by Border Patrol for days on end are the times when the rest of the system is already overloaded and in crisis.
Before December 2018, it had been a decade since any child had died in the custody of Border Patrol (or its partner division, the Customs and Border Protection Office of Field Operations, which deals with ports of entry). In December 2018, two children did.
The death of Jakelin Caal Maquin on December 8 has raised questions about Border Patrol’s responsiveness to medical needs and its capacity to deal with medical emergencies in remote areas of the border. The death of Felipe Alonzo-Gomez on Christmas Day has raised separate questions: about why a child was held in Border Patrol custody for six days before ICE was even asked to find a spot for him and his father, and about why he was shuffled between four facilities — including being taken from the hospital to a cramped highway checkpoint.
When it can no longer hold so many families in custody, the federal government has sometimes turned them out en masse without warning — as ICE did to several hundred families in El Paso before Christmas — leaving them in an unfamiliar country with a tight deadline to make it to their next immigration check-in.
At ports of entry, where it is legal to cross without papers if you wish to seek asylum in the US, some officials have told families to wait, or turned them away to come back later, in a semi-official policy known as “metering.” Metering has increased the incentive for families to cross between ports of entry illegally.
Democrats and progressives accuse the Trump administration of boxing itself into this resource crunch by detaining massive numbers of people (including families) to begin with, and argue that Border Patrol agents would be less overwhelmed if there were more capacity and willingness to process asylum seekers legally at ports. The administration, for its part, argues it’s doing everything it can and simply doesn’t have the resources it needs to provide humane care.
6) The “problem” of asylum seekers isn’t something that a wall can fix
It might be fair to call the current situation at the border a “humanitarian crisis.” But it isn’t why Trump shut down the government. And it isn’t something a wall can fix.
The point of walls is to prevent people from crossing into the US undetected. That’s not what most of the families and children who are crossing are doing. They’re turning themselves in to the nearest border agent they see on the US side.
Not all of them, but a large share, are seeking asylum — seeking to live legally in the US. That’s something they have a legal right to do even if they crossed illegally — and it’s something they could do at a port of entry even if there were a wall across the entire border.
The Trump administration’s specific problem with the influx of asylum seekers isn’t that it isn’t catching them — it’s that it can’t quickly deport them, and can’t detain them for the entire time until they are deported, because of extra legal protections for asylum seekers as well as for children and families. (The administration calls these “loopholes” that create a policy of “catch and release.”)
To Trump and his administration, “catch and release” is a crisis — because it means that large numbers of people are released into the US on their own recognizance, many of whom don’t make it all the way through the asylum process or ultimately have their asylum claims denied.
The administration has long agitated to overhaul the law to close these “loopholes,” over strident objection from Democrats. Whether “catch and release” is a crisis is a matter of discussion. Whether a wall would address it is not.
Children seeking asylum, like this girl, are released by immigration agents — in what Trump calls “catch and release.”
7) There is no evidence of a terrorist crisis at the border
The Trump administration’s efforts to claim that thousands of terrorists or potential terrorists have tried to cross into the US have been roundly mocked and debunked . NBC found that a total of six known or suspected terrorists were caught trying to come to the US in the first six months of 2018.
To a certain extent, the administration is (either carelessly or mendaciously) conflating “known or suspected terrorists” with “special interest aliens” — migrants who automatically get additional screening because of factors they might have in common with terrorists. One of those factors is “travel patterns” — in other words, being a “special interest alien” might just mean that one visited for, or is from, a country that the US considers friendly to terrorism. Even the Trump administration, which has banned nationals of several countries for similar reasons, isn’t claiming that everyone affected by the “travel ban” is a terrorist.
But the debunking of the administration’s specific numbers about terrorism at the border kind of misses a bigger point: that this whole conversation is about the typical vetting and screening process people undergo to enter the United States, and the number of people “caught” are the ones successfully identified.
There is no reason to assume that catching more potential “terrorists” means that more of them are slipping through. To the contrary, improving a vetting system should mean that (in theory) more people are being caught because fewer are slipping through.
On a very broad scale, it is true that perfect antiterrorism defense would require literally zero unauthorized border crossings. But that’s not the same as arguing that there is an imminent terrorist threat. And the way the administration talks about terrorism just isn’t related to the things it wants to do.
8) The border drug issue is about insufficient screening at ports
Similarly, Trump likes to characterize the border as a haven for drug smuggling, going on flights of fancy about drones or “sacks of drugs” hitting agents on the head.
It’s true that a lot of drugs consumed in the US come in via the border with Mexico. But the majority of them, consistently, come into the US at ports of entry — official border crossings. A wall would have no impact.
The Trump administration is actually working to address this problem, by scanning more vehicles at ports. In fact, its official offer to Congress to end the shutdown included $675 million for vehicle-scanning technology — though Vice President Pence said the request came from Democrats in Congress.
Building a wall probably wouldn’t cause more drugs to flow into the US. But that doesn’t mean building one is a national imperative.
9) Walls work — to direct people to cross somewhere else along the border
Trump built a series of prototype “walls” — only to decide to stick with the steel bollard style that was used before he came into office.
The Trump administration likes to cite statistics from areas where barriers have already been built, followed by a drop in apprehensions of unauthorized immigrants.
That’s how it’s supposed to work — because the wall was designed to get them to go somewhere else .
The purpose of physical barriers is what border agents call “funneling” — pushing people to cross where they can be more easily apprehended by Border Patrol.
That funneling can be helpful to ensure that Border Patrol agents catch as many people as possible, or to focus them on tracking more sophisticated criminal efforts.
But that doesn’t mean that you can reduce the overall number of people coming into the US by building as much wall as possible.
There is some evidence that previous border security buildups have succeeded in deterring some migrants from coming to the US over the past decade (though some scholars argue that the Great Recession played a bigger role). There’s even more evidence that it’s deterred people who were caught once from trying to cross a second time.
But it’s not clear whether that’s an indication that the US could be even more effective with even more enforcement, or that the government has already picked the low-hanging fruit.
The people still coming to the US without papers are, increasingly, what are sometimes referred to as “non-impactables” — people who can’t be affected by the harshness of the typical immigration enforcement regime. Children and families from Central America are coming despite a journey that is often dangerous, and coming despite the possibility that they might not make it. It’s hard to deter people who are already so desperate.
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Excellent summary.
There is no crisis at the border. There is no issue at the border that will be solved with a wall.
The great majority of those who are trying to enter the US are turning themselves into to US border agents in hopes of attaining asylum.
There is so much Anderson "Fake news" Cooper in everyone of these issues I don't know where to begin.
Pick one of the eight and lets debate it....
[deleted]
One of the biggest BS articles I have seen about the border in a long time! I do not know who this Dara Lind person is, but they are woefully misinformed. Article does not even state sources for said claims. I live 6 blocks from the AZ/Mexico border fence and can dispute approximately 75% or more of what is claimed ...
Are you really friggin' serious John??????????
C'MON DOWN HERE - we'll show you the crisis that the "visitors" totally overlook when they report the "sad news" of the poor ILLEGAL ALIENS who are intentionally and deliberately breaking the law.
Seriously 1st, post a link to an article that supports your position.
This incessant, 'come down here' is bullshit. If that is the ONLY way you can get your position across, expect to be disappointed.
There is a shit load of information coming from the border, local testimony and governmental data for you to use to support your posit, if you can.
There is NO fucking crisis on the border and there is NO need for a border WALL.
Trump knew early on that Mexico wouldn't pay for his WALL and his biggest worry was that his fans would figure out that he was full of shit. If you want proof I'd LOVE to provide it to you and everyone else here.
Each month, each repetitive rally, each day, the luster wore off and the Trump sycophants started wondering what happened to the WALL. Oh, it's being built. Oh it's almost finished. Oh Mexico is going to reimburse us. Oh we just need another 5.7 BILLION and the Dems won't give it to me. ALL a total load of bullshit.
Trump just used THE most prestigious room in the world to spew even MORE bullshit.
Dulay - knowing that you can see the U. S. /Mexico border from Indiana - sure, I believe you and all your CAPITALIZED facts and pure argumentative response.
If I wanted to write a paper, I'd give you all kinds of reference material. But, I'm here and you're not, and I am a "local" with "testimony".
What's your definition of "crisis" for those of us living on the border? No tamales? Enchiladas? Huevo Rancheros? Instead of trying to run over people with your words, give me your definition of "crisis".
Yup - the 27 mile wall being built from El Paso, TX and westward towards the Deming, NM station is being built. The fencing is being replaced with taller, more sturdy fencing in Antelope Wells, AZ.
You have a hate on for Trump - but this thread is not about Trump.
Irrelevant.
Good.
As is yours.
One link would suffice, none forthcoming.
Your 'testimony' hasn't actually been very forthcoming 1st. Other than an invitation, not much substance.
Why attempt to insult my intelligence 1st?
catastrophe · calamity · cataclysm · emergency · disaster
NO WALL is being built 1st. False rhetoric like that isn't conducive to good faith debate.
Trump is cited over a dozen times in the SEED, and over 40 times in comments. I cited Trump's most recent LIES about the TOPIC of the SEED. His sycophants rinse and repeat them as fact.
BTFW, I don't 'hate' Trump, he disgusts me.
Trump border wall construction underway in Chihuahuita in Downtown El Paso
Problem with your response Dulay is that you have proven my point. 1st, I don't have to PROVE anything to you when I write. If you disbelieve my comments, give me YOUR proof showing my error - that's the way it works. 2nd, and I could be wrong on this point, but blasting a person's response is not conducive to good faith debate either. Your aggressiveness throws most folks off and they will immediately attempt to defend themselves through responding in kind.
If you had been paying attention to various immigration threads in the past six or more years on NT, you would have found that I have given very in-depth information/FACTS/PICTURES/TESTIMONY regarding the current immigration issues. That does not mean that I am going to regurgitate them ad nauseam on each discussion dealing with ILLEGAL ALIENS. Hence - I have provided more than enough "substance".
"catastrophe" - "Emergency" - "disaster" - yup - pretty well explains/defines what WE, IN THE SW, are experiencing as a result of no physical barrier to prevent the flow of ILLEGAL ALIENS into our cities/counties/states.
Not knocking your intelligence - am curious 'bout your lack of a sense of humor though.
Just because a person/thing is mentioned by OTHERS in a seed, if your response is in regard to a totally unrelated comment - well, nuff said.
It doesn't matter how tall it is, it's a picket fence, NOT A WALL.
Actually 1st, it's on the one making the assertion to prove their posit. THAT'S the way it works.
Gee 1st, you didn't hesitate to aggressively blast John's seed.
BTW, are you claiming that you can't be 'aggressive' without being insulting?
I won't resort to claiming that I have provided more than enough substance in previous years since I've provided more than enough substance HERE this week.
Perhaps your comment just wasn't funny 1st.
Right, just because the SEED and multiple members have cited Trump in relation to this topic doesn't mean that you shouldn't call me out for doing so. /s
Amen! To them it is all about the poor illegals! They could give a rat's ass about the victims on this side of the border who suffer as a result of the chaos illegals crossing leave in their wake on private property in the rural areas. Most thumb their noses up at it and pretend it does not exist.
Address the article.
A four and half trillion dollar budget and neither the Republicans or Democrats can find a way to cut a few billion from it to cover this additional cost. I give them all an F for failures. I’d like to see the government shutdown until they can find a way to cut at least a trillion.
5 Things You Need To Know About The Southern Border Right Now
President Donald Trump delivered a national address about the southern border. Here is the reality.
President Donald Trump addressed the nation about a political situation that he himself created on Tuesday evening, claiming with little evidence that a "crisis" at the US southern border is so dire that he needs to build a wall.
Trump’s desire for a wall was his biggest campaign promise. It hasn’t happened so far, enraging some of his supporters. He shut down the government over it nearly 18 days ago — meaning about 800,000 federal employees are not being paid — and has said he won’t reopen it until he gets more than $5 billion to build the structure.
Democrats, who control the House of Representatives, have said he will not get that money.
While Trump didn't make news in his address, he said funding for the wall was crucial and called on Congress to close what he called "border security loopholes."
The situation at the border, however, is much more nuanced. Here are five things you need to know about the southern border right now.
1. Overall arrests at the border are at historical lows, while the number of families apprehended is at an all-time high.
Annual arrests along the nearly 2,000-mile southwest border are nowhere close to 2000's more than 1.6 million peak, a figure that has since been in decline. The number of immigrants apprehended at the southern border in 2018, 396,579 , was the fifth lowest total since 1973.
Meanwhile, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of families showing up at the border. In 2018, about one quarter of the people arrested between official border crossings were families, compared to just 3% in 2012.
US Border Patrol Apprehensions from 2000 through September 2018.
Border Patrol agents in November apprehended more than 25,000 family members — a monthly record — along the US–Mexico border. The number reflects a genuine issue for a system designed to detain single men from Mexico, not families, many of who are fleeing violence and poverty in Central America. In October and November family units made up more than half of border apprehensions .
2. The White House said the wall is necessary to stop terrorists from entering the country, but most try to enter via air.
Trump said the border wall is necessary in order to stop terrorists from entering the country even though figures show that most suspected or known terrorists stopped by US authorities traveled by air not through the border. The Trump administration said that 3,755 known or suspected terrorists were prevented from entering the US by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2017. But DHS later said most of those were trying to enter the US by air, not crossing the border.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders incorrectly said 4,000 terrorists were stopped at the border but NBC News found DHS figures showing that six — not 4,000 — people encountered by southern border authorities in the first half of 2018 were on the US’s list of known or suspected terrorists.
DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen also said the agency encountered more than 3,000 "special interest aliens" but these people are not confirmed terrorists. They are simply "non-US person who, based on an analysis of travel patterns, potentially poses a national security risk to the United States or its interests."
An analysis from the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, found that zero people were murdered or injured in terror attacks committed on US soil by special interest aliens who entered illegally from 1975 through the end of 2017. There were seven special interest aliens who initially entered the country illegally and were later convicted of planning a terrorist attack in the US, but they all entered through Canada or jumped ship in US ports before the list of special interest countries even existed.
3. It's true many asylum seekers are coming to the border, but the wall would not change that.
People in a caravan of Central American migrants set up camp to wait for access to request asylum in the US.
Instead the administration has implemented and proposed changes at the US-Mexico border that would make this crisis worse. Among them is limiting the number of asylum seekers who can ask for refuge in the US, forcing hundreds of destitute migrants to wait weeks or months along the border. Last year’s caravans, which arrived in Tijuana, highlighted the long waits and conditions migrants were forced to wait.
A process called metering or queueing at the border — when officials limit the number of individuals who can make asylum claims at ports of entry on any given day — has been found to push migrants to cross illegally instead of at an official border crossing.
A high-ranking Customs and Border Protection official told Congress late last year that border agents were limiting asylum applications along the border because allowing too many migrants to apply would inspire more migrants to come.
Jud Murdock, CBP’s acting assistant commissioner, said in a closed congressional briefing that CBP had chosen to limit asylum-seekers at ports of entries because “[t]he more we process, the more will come."
While the agency said the comment was taken out of context, a study released by the University of Texas at Austin's Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law found that the practice of metering, when officials limit the number of individuals who can make asylum claims at ports of entry on any given day, began more than two years ago and has become “institutionalized” across the Southwest border in the past six months under the Trump administration.
4. More people are overstaying visas than being arrested at the border.
Visa applicants wait to enter the US Embassy in Beijing, China.
While Trump claims there is a crisis at the southern border, more people are overstaying their visas than are being arrested at the southern border. At the end of fiscal year 2017, the latest available data, the Department of Homeland Security said it had 606,926 suspected in-country overstays. That year Border Patrol arrested 303,916 people at the border, about half of visa overstays.
5. Most drugs are entering the US through ports of entry.
Drugs are coming to the United States but most of them are not coming across desert stretches of the border — as Trump claimed on Tuesday night. The Drug Enforcement Administration says most drugs coming into the US are coming through official border crossings manned by United States authorities, according to a 2018 report .
“The most common method employed by these [transnational criminal organizations] involves transporting illicit drugs through US [ports of entry] in passenger vehicles with concealed compartments or commingled with legitimate goods on tractor trailers,” the report said.
“There are far better uses for funds than building a wall from a security perspective,” said John Sandweg, former director of ICE in 2013 during the Obama administration. He said money for a wall could be used to invest resources, among other things, for CBP at the ports of entry to better seize drugs and more mobile technology, better vetting of individuals applying for visas abroad, and more funding for immigration judges handling a backlog of hundreds of thousands of cases. “A wall is not going to solve any of the current threats we face along the border.”
If Trump is so right, why is it so easy for news organizations to present information that completely contradicts him ?
You better check FoxNews too. Even they called him out on his lies.
What, and have them actually start reporting news???
You mean the obviously progressive leftist liberal biased media? Those news organizations?
'What lies?'
Every single one of them - every word that came out of his big fat sphincter of a mouth.
How about the most extreme one to start with?
CLAIM: 4,000 terrorists caught at the southern border.
FACT: According to Trump's own state department, there have been ZERO terrorists caught at the southern border.
John, remember who you are dealing with...
Funny thing here...Number 9 is the point I have emphasized as to WHY WE NEED THE WALL. We want them to be diverted to where they will be safely picked up. It's called "Defense-in-depth", with the wall being the first part. Border Patrol is the second layer, with ICE being the third.
Down here we call it channeling...
OK fine. I can compromise. Don't build a wall.
But do fix all that other shit that you say a wall won't cure. Change the laws and patterns of (non)enforcement that encourage illegal immigration.
Stop allowing asylum claims for people who enter illegally, i.e. force them to present themselves legally at a point of entry.
Stop granting citizenship to the children of people who enter illegally or whose asylum claims have not yet been adjudicated.
Stop ignoring that millions of illegal aliens are working illegally in this country.
Stop coming up with bullshit reasons why we shouldn't deport people who are in the country illegally. There is no justification for it. Can we deport 11-22 million people? Not all at once to be sure, but when we have a bird in the hand, they should be deported, not released back into the country.
Deport people who overstay their visas. Not only if they are violent criminals. Every one of them. Not years from now, but right this minute.
Fix this stuff and I'll be happy to reconsider the wall.
Amen!
Since Bush announced the economic crash before he left office, the years that followed saw fewer crossings because there were no jobs to be found after 2008. Many middle class whites found themselves out of a job and going through the 99 week extension of unemployment. Thousands lost their jobs, their homes to foreclosure, and older workers never recovered at all or were forced into early retirement taking cuts in benefits.
Republicans destroyed the economy with 8 years in power, got into wars based on lies and no way to pay for them, and decimated the middle class.
They are right back at it again. Lies and more lies, tax cuts for corporate interests and the wealthy, using immigrants as a distraction tactic so you won't notice a repeat of the Bush years.
if you swallow the lie you fear what they are telling you and failing to see what they are actually doing.
The crisis: is that Republicans are afraid of Americans realizing they lie, cheat, steal and their fear is you will call them on it. Especially at the ballot box.
Every border state for the last 50 years has voted predominantly Republican and for 50 years they did NOTHING, except turning a blind eye to illegal immigration to appease their wealthy donors who were eager for the cheap labor. Border states with wealthy ranchers, big farms, wealthy Republican donors who wanted cheap domestic help, nudge, nudge, wink, wink, no complaints about immigration until recently. 50 years of Republican glad handing dirty politics all ignored.
Trump has been in the news for his use of illegal immigrant labor and has openly asked for foreign worker visas to staff his hotels and golf courses. Where is the right wing outrage over that piece of truth?