Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Watchdog questions ‘walls work’ stance
GAO says Homeland Security has no way to determine effects
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 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.
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 407 more 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. They extend 6 feet underground to deter burrowing and feature an array of anti-climbing configurations. One is crenelated with metal spikes.
DHS officials say their testing teams found the structures exceedingly difficult to scale or break through. The prototypes cost as much as $486,000 each to build, and DHS has not said if the $18 billion overall cost projection is based on one or several of those designs.
Instead, DHS officials have defended the expenditure by pointing to major decreases in arrests for illegal crossings in areas where tougher fencing was installed. In a new promotional video titled “Walls Work,” CBP said illegal traffic dropped 87 percent in San Diego after its two-layered barrier system was installed.
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 from 2013 to 2015 and found sectors of the border in California, New Mexico and other areas where more arrests occurred in places that already have fencing.
Critics of the president’s border security plans say their concerns have less to do with the physics of huge walls than with the fiscal prudence of building them at a time of ballooning deficits.
“We’re spending money like a drunken sailor,” said Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., a former naval officer and one of the members of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee that commissioned the GAO report. “We cannot continue to waste money, so we need to find out what works and what doesn’t.”