Barriers keep border wall in promise stage
WASHINGTON — “Mark my words,” Donald Trump said when he announced he was running for president nearly two years ago. He would build a wall on the southwest border, and Mexico would pay for it.
That promise, the most indelible aspect of Trump’s political branding, has endured. It still generates some of the loudest applause during Trump’s speeches, as it did at a weekend rally to mark his first 100 days in office.
But over the past week, Trump gave up on pushing Congress to include the billions needed for the wall in the spending plan that lawmakers expect to pass this week. There is little sign that Mexico will be compelled to pay for it, as Trump has so often vowed. And administration allies are increasingly trying to redefine “the wall” as something other than what Trump described in the campaign.
The wall may be the perfect metaphor for Trump’s administration so far: It remains a White House priority. Trump’s harsh rhetoric about it has probably helped stem the flow of illegal border crossings, stirring widespread fear in immigrant communities. But the physical wall itself remains very much in doubt, in part because members of Trump’s party seem unwilling to pay for it and members of his administration do not think it is completely necessary.
“It is clearly a defeat for the president” for the money not to be in the current spending bill, said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank in Washington, D.C., that advocates for reducing immigration levels.
“At a minimum there’s no appetite for it,” said Angela Kelley, a senior strategic adviser for immigration at Open Society Policy Center, which favors looser immigration restrictions.
The $1 trillion deal to keep the government open through September, agreed to by the White House and congressional leaders late Sunday, does not include money for new fencing or new border agents requested by the Trump administration.
It does include $1.5 billion for border security, a concession Democrats might not have made without the pressure from Trump on border spending. But that money is allocated for technology and maintenance of existing infrastructure at the border.
The most notable barrier in the spending plan: $50 million to upgrade the fence around the White House.
But Republicans in Congress, their spokesmen, and even administration officials these days, often define the wall as a catch-all for border security, rather than a permanent physical structure.
“There are places where a permanent physical barrier, a wall makes sense,” said Michael Steel, a former GOP leadership aide. “There are other places where it’s less practical and there are other options. But the overall goal remains the same.”
Trump’s own homeland security secretary, John Kelly, offered a similar assessment in April.
“It’s unlikely that we will build a wall or physical barrier from sea to shining sea,” he testified before the Senate Homeland Security Committee. Under questioning from Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., he agreed that the wall could be interpreted as a combination of drones, towers, fences, technology to detect tunnels and other electronic means combined with border guards. “The wall is all of that,” he said.
That approach would mirror policies pursued by Trump’s predecessors and would roughly follow the strategy advocated by officials at the National Border Patrol Council, who have said, for example, that fences are often preferable to solid walls because they are harder to hide behind.
Official cost estimates for a wall vary widely — from $12 billion to $38 billion, all the way to a nearly $70 billion estimate by Senate Democrats.
Most Americans don’t expect Trump to actually build it, surveys indicate. In a YouGov poll conducted last week, 51 percent of adults said they did not think Trump would build a wall, while only 29 percent said he was likely to accomplish that goal. The share of adults in the poll who said Trump would likely not achieve the goal was higher than for any of the campaign promises YouGov asked about.
But there is tension between broad public opinion and Trump’s supporters. Republicans in the YouGov poll were far more likely to believe the wall would get built. And other polls, which show only 30 to 40 percent of Americans want a wall built, show much greater support among Republicans, especially conservatives.