Ducey hops border wall and lands in Trumpland
If you were beginning to wonder if Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey actually lives in Arizona he provided the answer. No. He does not.
The governor has packed his bags and moved to the mythical realm of make believe called Trumpland, as he so succinctly demonstrated in this tweet:
Arizona has watched for decades as Washington has failed to prioritize border security. It’s unfortunate it has come to this rather than Congress doing its job. But action is needed. I support President Trump’s plan to secure our border.
The truth is, Ducey may have moved to this fantasy land even before Trump became president. The governor travels to that distant dream world each time he looks to be elected, or reelected. Or, these days, whenever he needs to kowtow to the current president, who resides in the same selfserving Shangri-la.
The so-called “crisis” on the southwest border is a political ploy. It is a very effective one. It frightens people, particularly those who do not go looking for actual facts but only listen to politicians.
But this is the truth.
At the end of last year Trump’s Department of Homeland Security announced that arrests related to illegal border crossings are at the lowest level since 1971. Tom Homan, acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said, "Overall, removals are down because the border's under better control than it has been in 45 years.”
Actually, it was 46 years.
But that doesn’t fit the fish story the president – and the governor – require to motivate their base.
It's a recurring strategy. Politicians frighten you into voting for them with scary border talk and after the election – poof – the problem they talked about seems to disappear.
Not long before the 2014 election, when he first ran for governor, Ducey told The Arizona Republic's Bob Ortega that the border was a BIG issue. In one article Ducey repeatedly told Ortega that "the southern border is unsecured and wide-open," adding, "I will do everything possible under the law as governor, fencing, satellites, Guardsmen and more police and prosecutors."
Even when he said these things Ducey knew (or should have) that the federal government actually had spent more than $126 billion on border enforcement in the previous decade or so.
As Ortega had reported on numerous occasions, this included hundreds of miles of fence, thousands of ground sensors, radar and camera towers, drones and aircraft for surveillance, and the number of Border Patrol agents in Arizona increased to almost
5,000.
Seven months after that election, the found that Ducey had not fulfilled any of those campaign promises. Instead, he was trying to mend fences with Mexico after years of discord under former Gov. Jan Brewer. And for good reason. Mexico is a huge trading partner.
But now we have President Trump and he wants his wall, and Ducey is playing along.
This time, the governor is being preaching a prevarication.
Jim Small at produced an excellent column debunking the governor’s Trumpland fabrication under a column headlined “Ducey’s border security whopper.”
He writes in part of Ducey’s tweeted border wall support:
“This, of course, is utter nonsense. There are roughly 20,000 border patrol officers for Customs and Border Protection — and 85 percent of those are in the Southwest border sectors. Since fiscal year 2005, the number of border patrol officers in the Southwest has increased by nearly 70 percent. Correspondingly, the number of apprehensions — the figure used as a proxy for how many people are crossing illegally — has declined by 66 percent.
"In Arizona alone, the Tucson and Yuma sectors, there are 4,550 border patrol officers as of fiscal year 2017...” called out for
We’ve come not to expect much in the realm of truth from the president. We expect him to spread fear and to continue spiraling down the rabbit hole of deceit and distortion.
The sad part for Arizona is that Gov. Ducey did not accidentally fall into that hole.
He jumped.