Democratic mayors and other officials who’ve joined the resistance should don hard hats and volunteer for work on President Trump’s wall.
Take Rahm Emanuel. According to the Drug Enforcement Agency’s “2017 National Drug Threat Assessment”, his Chicago “is home to a multitude of street gangs, whose involvement in the retail sale of the steady stream of illicit drugs trafficked into the city by the Mexican Cartels has greatly contributed to the violence and gang-related homicides that currently plague the city.”
The report also makes clear that most of the heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamines available in the U.S. is smuggled in from Mexico over the Southwest border. While policymakers should explore effective means of reducing demand, a lot more can be done to reduce supply.
[Related: Trump on opioids: ‘No good, really bad for you in every way’]
A heroin glut means that prices are down, and drug purity is actually up. Cartels, according to multiple news reports, are so flush with supply they’ve instructed street-level dealers to give away free samples.
Law enforcement can — and must — do better than interdicting a measly 5 to 10 percent of illegal drugs flowing over the Southwest border. (The estimate is contained within a 2015 U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Report, “The State of America’s Border Security”.)
Hence the wall. Drugs are smuggled not just over the vast and largely unguarded border lands between official ports of entry, but also straight through those ports, hidden inside trains, tractor trailers, passenger vehicles, etc. So, the wall is no panacea. But it is necessary.
An additional 700 miles or so of hardened barrier should allow Customs and Border Patrol and federal, state, and local partners to use other existing and future assets and resources in a much more efficient and targeted manner to stop the traffickers. The result will be a much higher rate of interdiction.
A border wall, moreover, will do a great deal to close the revolving door of illegal immigrants who are deported after committing a criminal offense but subsequently walk right back in with impunity over the Southwest border, less than a third of which has a physical barrier of any kind.
Jose Inez Garcia Zarate, the seven-time felon who killed Kathryn Steinle in 2015, is an infamous example of said revolving door.
Although the proximate cause of Kathryn’s death was San Francisco’s sanctuary policies, pursuant to which local officials released Zarate despite an Immigration & Customs Enforcement detainer, Zarate shouldn’t have been back in the country in the first place, having been previously removed multiple times.
As far as the failure to reach an immigration deal, Democratic intransigence has no doubt played a role. The more immediate cause, though, is President Trump’s overreach, based on his. “concession”, now nominally rescinded, of offering a pathway to citizenship for DACA eligible individuals, i.e., “Dreamers.”
But the need for a legislative replacement to DACA is a no-brainer. And polls show that Trump voters oppose deporting Dreamers by wide margins anyhow.
Trump wants to have his cake and eat it too. The reason no deal has succeeded is that he is demanding both these important improvements to enforcement and a whole new legal immigration system — a “merit-based” system that focuses on needed job skills and not family connections.
There are good arguments in favor of such a merit-based immigration system, but the votes just aren’t there. Trump needs to lower his demands and go for what’s possible in Congress. He can thus get the tools not only to choke the flow of the drugs that are killing so many Americans, but also to ensure that individuals who are removed after committing a crime actually stay out.
That’s what “winning” means right now on immigration.
Ken Sondik is a practicing attorney in Zionsville, Ind.
