DHS: Trump’s $5 Billion Request Will Build 215 Miles of Border Wall

Construction workers putting up new wall at the border located at the Chula Vista Area of
Tim Tucciarone/Flickr
Neil Munro

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials are detailing the border-wall extensions they will build if Congress provides the $5 billion sought by President Donald Trump in 2019.

The $5 billion addition will buy “215 miles of Border Patrol’s highest priority border wall miles,” said a statement by agency spokeswoman Katie Waldman. She continued:

When combined with the funds provided in FY 2017 and FY 2018, if funded at $5B in FY 2019 DHS expects to construct more than 330 miles of border wall in the U.S. Border Patrol’s highest priority locations across the Southwest border.

DHS is positioned to construct 215 miles of Border Patrol’s highest priority border wall miles including:

[roughly] 5 miles in San Diego Sector in California

[roughly] 14 miles in El Centro Sector in California

[roughly] 27 miles in Yuma Sector in Arizona

[roughly] 9 miles in El Paso Sector in New Mexico

[roughly] 55 miles in Laredo Sector in Texas

[roughly] 104 miles in Rio Grande Valley Sector in Texas

A DHS statement said:

Walls Work. When it comes to stopping drugs and illegal aliens across our borders, border walls have proven to be extremely effective. Border security relies on a combination of border infrastructure, technology, personnel and partnerships with law enforcement at the state, local, tribal, and federal level. For example, when we have installed wall in Yuma Sector, we have seen border apprehensions decrease by 90 percent. In San Diego we saw on Sunday that dilapidated, decades old barriers are not sufficient for today’s threat and need to be removed so new – up to – 30 foot wall sections can be completed.

However, no barrier cannot work without changes to the asylum laws and child-protection rules set by Congress and by judges.

Migrants use those catch-and-release loopholes to walk through the existing walls and fences by merely bringing children up to the border and then declaring they want asylum. The loopholes have allowed at least 200,000 Central Ameican migrants to walk through the walls and to get jobs in the United States.

Trump has pressured Congress to close the loopholes, but he is facing pressure from the business-first GOP leaders to drop his demand for legal changes that would close the loopholes in any border wall. Trump has not clearly said that any deal on border-funding must also include border-law changes.

In the United States, the establishment’s economic policy of using migration to boost economic growth shifts wealth from young people towards older people by flooding the market with cheap white-collar and blue-collar foreign labor. That flood of outside labor spikes profits and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor offered by blue-collar and white-collar employees.

The policy also drives up real estate prices, widens wealth-gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and sidelines at least five million marginalized Americans and their families, including many who are now struggling with opioid addictions.

Immigration also pulls investment and wealth away from heartland states because coastal investors can more easily hire and supervise the large immigrant populations who prefer to live in the coastal states.

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