Reporters see it as a slam dunk to point out that President Trump has only completed a fraction of the construction of more southern border “wall” that he promised because, Hahaha, aren’t his supporters a bunch of suckers for believing he’d ever get it done?!
But as with most things the media say about immigration, they’re either deliberately misleading or flat-out lying.
The Washington Post reported this week that the administration “has completed just about 60 miles of ‘replacement’ barrier during the first 2½ years of Trump’s presidency, all of it in areas that previously had border infrastructure.” Several paragraphs later, the report said that additional “hundreds of miles of fencing” are merely “in blueprint form.”
That’s kind of true, but also not really. So here’s the truth about the “wall.”
First, there is no wall and there will never be a wall. There are only “walls,” which already exist in a lot of places along the border, and which Border Patrol agents have told me are effective in controlling immigration, though they’ve said they want more of it in other places where there is nothing. I’ve seen the “walls” first hand when I visited the Texas border earlier this year and the administration is doing the right thing in building more of them there, where about 10 miles of new walls started under construction this year.
Second, when the media specifically refer to “completed” border walls, they’re excluding dozens of miles of wall that aren’t just “in blueprint form,” but which federal money is already allocated for their construction and which are already scheduled for building. But it’s not as though a bunch of contractors are sitting on their thumbs waiting for permission to start the process. A lot of the border areas that have no walls are private lands held by American citizens whose permission is required in order for the government to do anything. The same way the EPA can’t come to your home and plant a massive solar panel in your yard without asking, the government can’t throw up a fence on a plot of grass and dirt that belongs to someone else. Before construction of more walls can begin, the administration will first have to work out a deal with the land owners, which could either mean purchasing property from them or receiving permission to erect the barriers.
Third, “replacement barrier” is a phrase that should never be used about the border. When the administration “replaces” barriers on the border, it’s not as though they’re swapping out one chain-link fence for the exact same thing. There are long stretches of land on the border that had barriers but they could have never been described honestly by anyone as “walls.” They were vehicle barriers (sometimes referred to as Normandy fencing) that were roughly five-feet high and intended to prevent the passing of cars and trucks, not people on foot. In New Mexico, for example, 20 miles of vehicle barriers were replaced with actual “walls,” 25 or 30-feet high steel bollard fences. (You can see a side-by-side comparison of vehicle barrier and its “replacement” here.)
Finally, as I’ve been wailing about for months, even if we had one giant, continuous, wall on the border, it would not have helped in the detention and removal of a fraction of the nearly 1 million illegal immigrants so far this year who have crossed into the country. As of late July, nearly 700,000 illegal immigrants were apprehended at the border. More than 500,000 of them claimed asylum or were unaccompanied minors. All of them are granted instant legal protection to stay in the U.S. while their cases are sorted out, and that can take up to five years.
That’s the truth about the “wall.”
