Trump officials say: ‘Walls work’
Government admits there’s no way to measure efficacy of barriers
More than a year after the government’s top oversight body urged the Department of Homeland Security to develop a way to measure the effectiveness of fencing and barriers along the border with Mexico, DHS has no such tool ready, even as President Donald Trump prepares to pick the winning designs for his $18 billion border wall.
Trump officials in recent weeks have dismissed criticism of their border security plan with a well-established defensive principle and simple retort: “Walls work.”
But a February 2017 report by the Government Accountability Office found DHS has no way to measure how well they work, where they work best, or whether less-expensive alternatives could be just as effective.
Despite the assumption that illegal traffic enters through areas where fencing is absent, the report identified several sectors where more arrests occur in locations that have existing barriers.
U.S. border agents collect “geotag” data, electronic markers that assign geographic locations, to map illegal crossings and arrests. But DHS has no means to gauge the extent to which those incursions are impeded by “tactical infrastructure,” the report noted, undermining the agency’s ability to avoid wasteful spending.
“An assessment of border fencing’s contributions to border security operations could help position [U.S. Customs and Border Protection] to identify the cost effectiveness of border fencing compared to other assets the agency deploys,” the report said.
DHS officials said this week they are working with the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory to develop such an evaluation system, and it may be ready later this year.
President Trump is moving forward anyway. His public statements have demonstrated a keen interest in the aesthetic properties of the wall, along with its height. His administration has budgeted $1.6 billion for wall construction this year.
Trump is scheduled to travel to San Diego on Tuesday to view eight prototypes and likely announce one or more winning designs. The trip will be Trump’s first as president to California, a state his administration is suing for refusing to assist with federal immigration enforcement.
Trump’s wall-building plan — currently stalled in Congress — would spend $18 billion over 10 years to add 316 miles of new barriers and replace aging fencing along another 407 miles.
The 30-foot steel and concrete prototypes showcased in San Diego are far taller and more formidable than anything currently in place along the border.
“Border walls have proven to be extremely effective in preventing the flow of drugs and illegal aliens across our borders,” DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said in a statement this month, after a court victory allowing Homeland Security officials to move forward with fast-track construction plans. “Simply put — walls work,” she said.
But when the independent, nonpartisan GAO launched its study in 2015, it determined that the efficacy of walls and fencing varies widely across the 2,000-mile border, depending on a range of factors including topography, proximity to urban areas and the ancillary presence of tools such as cameras, sensors and enforcement agents.
GAO researchers analyzed the location of illegal entries between 2013 and 2015 and found sectors of the border in California, New Mexico and other areas where more arrests occurred in places that already have fencing. DHS officials recorded 9,287 breaches of border fencing between 2010 and 2015 in areas with “pedestrian” barriers that are designed to be more forbidding than “vehicle” fencing. Areas with older “legacy” fencing were nearly six times more likely to be breached, the GAO report noted, and presumably many of those sections will be first to be replaced by the taller and tougher ramparts on display in San Diego.
In an interview, the head of the Border Patrol’s Strategic Planning and Analysis Directorate, Benjamin “Carry” Huffman, said after a career in the agency he doesn’t need a yardstick to know that walls and fencing are effective.
“Having done this for 33 years, I can tell you a wall is essential,” Huffman said. “A wall is enduring capability. And having worked the border with a wall and without it, I can say you want to work the border with it.”
Look at San Diego, Huffman continued. “It’s a pleasant place to be, one of the finest cities in America. In 1985 it was quite a different place. You had 1.6 million people coming across the southern border. There was a wave of humanity flowing through the area. South San Diego was practically uninhabitable. Property values were in the tank,” he said.
“Fast forward a few years and we started adding this infrastructure,” Huffman continued, describing the addition of new primary fencing backed by another “secondary” fence with Border Patrol roadway in between, creating a no man’s land where illegal crossers get trapped.
“We changed the whole environment in that area,” said Huffman. “The U.S. government literally made millionaires down there. They had property that was practically unusable and it changed dramatically. That alone shows what happens when you get rid of the chaos, get control of the border, allowing prosperity to reign.”
Last year the number of people arrested along the border with Mexico dropped to a 49-year low. Most of the Central American migrants cross the Rio Grande in South Texas. Homeland Security officials have prioritized that area for a surge of new wall construction along the winding riverbanks.