Why Trump’s ‘big, beautiful wall’ won’t help border security

Nancy Pelosi is wrong. President Trump’s proposed border wall isn’t “immoral.” It’s stupid.

Trump provoked the government shutdown by insisting on money for the wall. He keeps hammering on the subject. A

West Wing staffer acknowledged to The New York Times that Trump’s fixation has created a “oneissue White House.” Reality, howev- er, keeps undercutting Trump’s argument.

Last week, federal agents stopped a 254-pound shipment of fentanyl from Mexico. It was a record bust. It happened not along a barrier-free section of the border but at the Nogales, Ariz., checkpoint.

Fentanyl, a dangerous synthetic, has been driving the rise in fatal drug overdoses. Smugglers had hidden this load under piles of cucumbers. As authorities have said regularly, most illegal drugs enter from Mexico at legal points of entry. Trump’s “wall” wouldn’t stop them.

More money might. Border security can and should be better. Yet Trump keeps insisting on trying to spend money the wrong way.

The Department of Homeland Security estimates that it would cost $22 billion to build a barrier on the roughly 1,350-portion of the southern border that doesn’t have one. Trump claims that the nation needs the wall yesterday because of an immigration crisis.

Yet lawsuits remain 13 years after President George W. Bush tried to put a wall where landowners didn’t want it. The government can’t seize property without an eminent domain hearing. Trump would waste time and money when Homeland Security could expand the use of better, cheaper methods such as electronic surveillance.

Trump also is fabricating a crisis on the border with his deployment of 3,750 more active-duty soldiers. Though their role is to help with surveillance and to install razor wire, the deployment — which Trump has extended twice — suggests a national security threat.

In fact, apprehensions on the southern border have been dropping precipitously. During the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, there were roughly 400,000, down from almost 1.75 million in 2000.

Though the trend most recently has been slightly upward, that change is of Trump’s making. His administration has ordered the arrest of more family members. Immigration cases have doubled since Trump took office. Democrats have proposed money for more judges, but Trump has refused.

The president is correct that Pelosi once voted for a border barrier. So did Chuck Schumer, now leading the resistance among Senate Democrats to Trump’s wall. But there’s more to the story.

In 2006, Pelosi and Schumer voted for the Secure Fence Act. It provided $2.3 billion between 2007 and 2015 money for physical barriers. The legislation, though, included many other border security measures.

There have been problems. Customs and Border Protection identified roughly 9,300 breaches in border barriers between 2000 and 2015. Trump’s wall, however, amounts to Fire, Ready, Aim.

Last July, the Government Accountability Office analyzed Homeland Security’s response to the executive order Trump issued soon after taking office. It called for the agency to “immediately plan, design, and construct a wall or other physical barriers along the southwest border.”

According to the GAO, Customs and Border Protection had not studied the cost of the barrier based on location, which can raise the price. For a key segment near San Diego, the agency hadn’t finalized its design. The GAO concluded that the plan “lacks key information.”

Trump also has claimed that the wall would reduce terrorist threats. His own State Department, however, acknowledges that terrorists aren’t seeking to come here through the southern border.

Moreover, right-wing militants commit more domestic terrorism than Islamic extremists. Yet Trump’s 2018 budget would have cut funding to deal with such violence by $600 million and shifted that money to the wall.

Trump refers often to the murder of American citizens by illegal immigrants. All those deaths are tragedies. Yet over just four days in January, three American-born men killed 14 people in mass shootings, one at a SunTrust bank in Sebring.

Border security is part of comprehensive immigration reform. The Congressional Budget Office calculated that the 2013 reform bill that passed the Senate with bipartisan support would have reduced the federal budget by almost $200 billion over 10 years. How? By providing a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants.

To Trump, that conclusion would make no sense. He speaks often of a wall. The reality is that he’s operating from a bunker.