El Chapo & ‘The Wall’
Just hours after negotiators reached a budget deal giving President Trump far less for border security than he’d demanded, jurors came back with guilty verdicts against Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman for a massive smuggling operation that brought countless tons of cocaine, heroin, meth and marijuana into the United States.
Funny, that. Especially when no one thinks that putting El Chapo away will put a dent in the Sinaloa cartel’s operations, nor its rivals’.
We’ve always seen Trump’s “Build The Wall” talk as a catchy slogan evoking the host of measures needed to at last get serious about border security. It’s his opponents who try to wave it off as magical thinking.
No, barriers won’t stop drug smuggling. As critics note, smugglers also use tunnels, secret compartments in trucks crossing at checkpoints and other means.
But that hardly makes walls futile — if it did, opponents wouldn’t work so hard to prevent them. Israel regularly has to deal with terrorist tunnels and other evasions of its security fence, but the barrier has unquestionably made Israelis far safer.
Nor does spending on fences mean Immigration and Customs Enforcement shouldn’t also get better technology, such as scanners to beef up checkpoint inspections. Heck, anti-immigration activists don’t push “The Wall” but tech like the E-verify system to deal with people who enter legally on tourist visas and so on but then overstay.
Yet obsessing with not building barriers is as silly as the cartoon version of The Wall.
Just last month, ranchers from southwestern New Mexico’s Hidalgo County actually appealed to local station KOB-4 to hear their concerns over the county’s 87 miles of border with Mexico that’s mainly “guarded” by a 5-foot barbed-wire fence . . . with multiple unmanned gates. The ranchers spoke of “an influx of people,” some with “bundles of weed, coke and carrying heavy artillery.”
The county manager appealed to Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham for help. Her reply? Last week, denouncing Trump’s “fear-mongering,” she withdrew most of the National Guard her predecessor had sent to the border. She got national headlines; the folks on the ground, nothing.
None of this is to say the president should reject Congress’ deal; maybe some of the new barriers it authorizes can help Hidalgo County. What it means is that reality, not just Trump’s “stubbornness,” guarantees the issue can’t go away.