At the border
President Donald Trump wants Americans to believe there’s a crisis at our southern border and that hordes of illegal immigrants are preparing to swarm. It’s time to deploy troops to protect the border, he says. This is nonsense.
The swarm is a group of people gathered more than 870 miles away in southern Mexico. The U.S. Border Patrol is more than adequately equipped to handle the flow of illegal border crossings, which recently reached their lowest level since 1971. Deploying troops, who are trained for combat instead of law enforcement, vastly increases the danger of mishaps and threatens to hinder, not help, the Border Patrol’s mission.
Trump wrongly asserts that a migrant “caravan” estimated at more than 1,000 is coming to take advantage of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. The president should know, since he canceled the program last year, that DACA deportation deferrals only applied to youths who had lived in the United States since 2007 and had been younger than age 16 when they immigrated. DACA has never been an option for new arrivals.
Such wild assertions are typical of Trump’s scare tactics. He wants Americans to believe illegal drugs are flooding across the border along with hordes of migrants. In fact, an estimated 40 percent of illegal immigrants in the United States arrived legally but overstayed their visas. Most bulk drug shipments arrive undetected in cars and tractor trailers passing through legal border crossings.
The troop-deployment plan is the result of a temper tantrum by the president because Congress last month refused to grant his $25 billion request for border wall funding.
There is no border crisis. Trump’s reaction to the caravan was not based on CIA intelligence, secret satellite imagery or hours of consultations with U.S. diplomats and military advisers. It was based on inflammatory reporting he saw on Fox News.
This sort of inconsistent rhetoric is typical of what Karim Sadjadpour, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, terms the “Trump Paradox: Everything the president of the United States says must be taken seriously; nothing that Donald Trump says can be taken seriously.”
American tax dollars go to waste, and the nation’s credibility suffers, when our president wildly exaggerates the facts. And the dangers of provoking a real crisis dramatically increase when the president bases policy decisions on emotion and television instead of listening to his top intelligence, military and diplomatic advisers.