President Trump on Thursday joined Democrats in their stupid semantics war over his proposed border wall, tweeting, “Lets just call them WALLS from now on and stop playing political games! A WALL is a WALL!”
It’s true that “a wall is a wall,” but if Democrats don’t want to use the word, then nobody cares — least of all U.S. Border Patrol agents.
When I visited the Rio Grande Valley sector at the southernmost point of Texas, where there are more illegal crossings from Mexico than at any other part of the border, I asked Border Patrol division chief John Morris what he made of the distinction the White House and congressional Democrats are making between a “wall” and other types of physical barriers on the border.
“So, whether you want to call it fence, you want to call it barrier, you want to call it wall, we don’t really care because to us, the semantics lies within politics,” he told me. “We’re all about functionality. If I need to call it ‘fence,’ if I need to call it ‘barrier,’ I will.”
[Read: Democrats counter Trump: How about a ‘pedestrian fence’?]
In that part of the border, I saw the areas where they have some border barrier, 25-foot tall vertical structures made of both concrete and thick steel slats. In some areas it may stretch a few miles, in some areas just several yards. But in others, there is no barrier at all, and it’s in those areas where Morris said that 90 percent of migrant apprehensions take place.
Morris told me the goal since the mid-1990s has simply been to build that same type of structure in as many areas as possible along the sector’s continuous border with Mexico.
He calls it “wall,” but he said that the term could apply to any substantial barrier along the border, though the appearance of it, depending on any other border sector’s needs and the terrain, might vary.
“If you go to San Diego, theirs looks different than Yuma, whose looks different than El Paso,” he told me. “So, in general, do we all use the term wall? We do. But you know, when a lot of my friends or representatives or folks call me, ‘John, do you guys really need a 30-foot concrete — because they’re picturing a 30-foot concrete wall — I’m like, well, that would probably work but that’s not what we have down here, and what we have is working.”
Democrats are refusing to fund anything called “the wall” for their own political reasons. They’ve spent three years calling it racist, so they can’t exactly back down now.
But as dumb as that looks, Trump is going to look even worse if he fails on border security because he had to insist on calling it “the wall.”
