Border wall shrinks amid DACA fight
Compromise looks at economic rights, property concerns
WASHINGTON — With political brinksmanship intensifying Tuesday over an elusive immigration deal that threatens to shut down the government by the weekend, there were new signs of softening on President Donald Trump’s demand for a border wall.
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, facing questions from Democrats about the economics and property rights of border communities, made clear that the administration is prepared to take into account local concerns in the construction of a border wall.
“What we’ll have to do is look at the terrain, the traffic, the accessibility,” Nielsen said in a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. “We have to tailor the solutions for each part of the border to make sure we don’t have to do anything that’s unnecessary.”
While Democrats continued to spar with the White House over allegedly disparaging remarks Trump made about some Third World countries last week, Nielsen echoed Trump’s remarks from last week that the wall doesn’t need to cover the entirety of the nearly 2,000 mile border.
While that flexibility exists, Trump has remained adamant that he wants a wall. He tweeted Tuesday that “we must have a great WALL to protect us.”
It remains unclear, however, whether Trump’s more flexible vision for a border wall will help resolve the impasse over protections for Dreamers, immigrants brought into the country illegally as children.
The White House announced on Tuesday that it is appealing a federal judge’s injunction barring the administration from ending the Obama-era program protecting Dreamers from deportation.
And as the administration seeks Supreme Court backing for its authority to dismantle the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, Republican lawmakers vowed to make better border security a part of any legislative deal on Dreamers. Many Democrats, meanwhile, are sworn to oppose any money for a wall.
A new bipartisan plan released Tuesday by San Antonio Republican Will Hurd and California Democrat Pete Aguilar would protect Dreamers from deportation and beef up border technology.
May not come to a vote
While the compromise measure has the support of some 40 House members, it does not envision a border-length wall favored by many conservatives. Nor does it include protections for the parents of Dreamers than many liberals want.
Hurd said that while he hopes to cobble together enough centrist support for a bipartisan majority in the House, he acknowledged that he had “no commitment” from House GOP leaders to bring it to a vote by Friday, the deadline for a broader 2018 budget agreement that could head off a government shutdown.
Meanwhile, immigration activists continued to press Democrats to hold fast against any stop-gap funding measure that does not resolve the legal status of some 800,000 Dreamers, who — depending on what the high court does — could begin to lose their Obama-era protections in early March.
Trump, who rescinded the DACA program in September, said last week he would back any compromise Congress reached to extend protections to Dreamers as long as it includes money for the wall, his signature campaign promise.
Since then, however, negotiations have broken down in a furor over Trump’s remarks disparaging immigration from Haiti, El Salvador and some African countries — remarks that Trump now denies he made.
Nielsen, who was in the White House negotiating session where the remarks were reportedly made, testified Tuesday that she “did not hear” the offensive comments, though she acknowledged that the president “used tough language in general, as did other congressmen in the room.”
But with Trump and many Republicans professing a desire to cut a deal to help Dreamers, the central sticking point — besides Trump’s language — remains the wall.
Among the most vocal critics have been border lawmakers like Brownsville Democrat Filemon Vela, who said that “under no circumstances” would he vote for “a penny for border wall funding.”
Any agreement that heads off anything but a short-term budget deal will likely have to address wall funding, in part or in whole.
When Vermont’s Patrick Leahy, a top Democrat on the committee, challenged Nielsen to explain the need for a “wall the length of our country,” she interjected, “It’s not. The president has made that clear.”
At the same time, she defended the administration’s $18 billion request for a wall and other border security measures over the next decade.
“All I can tell you is that walls work,” she said. “We have examples of that. We have documented data.”
As she testified, the White House distributed a New York Post column written by author and former Hoover Institution media follow Paul Sperry arguing that 131 miles of fencing erected along the border in El Paso in 2010 dramatically reduced illegal border crossing and crime in the city.
El Paso’s relatively low crime rate has often been cited by Democratic Senate hopeful Beto O’Rourke, whose district includes the city, as a success story of good U.S.-Mexico relations. But, Sperry wrote, “before 2010, federal data show the border city was mired in violent crime and drug smuggling. … Once the fence went up, however, things changed almost overnight.”
Protecting Texas parks
Meanwhile, Texas U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, one of the top Republicans in the DACA negotiations and on the Judiciary panel, sought assurances from Nielsen about protecting parks and natural areas that draw tourists, such as the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge in the Rio Grande Valley.
“We … need to be sensitive to the concerns that the local community has about a huge economic benefit there,” he said. He also cited the construction of levy walls in Hidalgo County as an approach advances both economic development and border security.
Cornyn has long advocated for a combination of physical infrastructure, technology and more law enforcement presence along the border, calling a wall — where needed — just one component of a border strategy.
That holistic approach appeared to get some buy-in from Trump last week, when he said in a nationally-broadcast exchange with Democrats at the White House that a border might not work everywhere.
“There’s lots of places where you don’t need a wall because of nature,” Trump said. “You’ve got a mountain and rivers. You got a violent river.”
Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake, an outspoken GOP critic, said later that Trump’s remarks on the wall “the best part” of the meeting.
Nielsen said Tuesday the administration’s proposal on the wall would cover about 722 miles, much of it replacing existing fencing and barriers.
But she deflected questions from Democrats pressing the administration about Trump’s promise to make Mexico pay for the wall. “My priority is to increase border security and build that wall that will work,” she said.
“I’ve heard a lot of promises in my decades here,” Leahy said. “I’m waiting to see if this one is fulfilled.”