The orange man’s wall on the southern border seems to finally be coming together. The wall/fencing infrastructure that has gone up in San Diego has reportedly been very effective at stopping illegal crossings. The amount of illegals that security personnel are being forced to apprehend are down tremendously.
As part of President Trump’s campaign promise to build a wall along the southern border, 14 miles of 18-foot primary steel bollard fencing has been built in San Diego, with a secondary 30-foot steel bollard barrier behind that which is approximately 80 percent complete.
They replace the 8-foot landing mats, which were often supported by a steel mesh behind that. The difference is dramatic.
“It’s incredibly different…I’m able to see the old landing mat right next to the bollard and I’m able to see the old mesh right next to the new bollard and the difference is startling,” Douglas Harrison, Chief Patrol Agent of U.S. Border Patrol’s San Diego Sector, told Fox News.
Harrison explained that it’s not a barrier that can be easily scaled: “It’s an intimidating barrier. I’m an old Army guy, I was in the 101st Airborne and I would not try to cross that.”
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How effective the new barrier is being, in terms of both deterring migrants and stopping crossings, is tough to calculate. One thing that is clear is that its erection is coinciding with a sharp decline in apprehensions, although correlation does not necessarily equate to causation. In August, there were 3,326 apprehensions in the San Diego sector, down from 6,880 in March and 5,884 in May.
That reflects a borderwide trend that has seen apprehensions along the border as a whole drop almost 65 percent since May, as part of a multi-faceted strategy from the administration that has included not only barrier construction, but also agreements such as the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) — by which tens of thousands of migrants have been returned to Mexico while they await their immigration hearings.
The orange man is on track to complete 400 to 500 miles of wall/fencing infrastructure by the end of 2020.
I know that people have been upset that this project hasn’t moved fast enough and that “new” wall/fencing hasn’t really gone up yet. However, I’m much more positive on what’s happening than the naysayers.
The places that technically had some type of barriers up could not even be considered a real barrier. They were mostly normandy-styled barriers meant to stop vehicle traffic but were totally ineffective at preventing people from crossing. So these places where replacement wall is going up is effectively new wall because there was no real wall there to begin with.
Say what you want about the orange man, but none of this would be happening if Hillary were elected. The orange man despite his shortcomings, has so far been the least damaging President to White interests in my lifetime.
