One Year of Trump: Border Wall Prototypes Sit in Desert As Border-Crossings Surge to Obama Levels
A year ago, President Trump committed to the American people to build a wall along the United States-Mexico border to stop illegal immigration and the flow of drugs into the country.
A year later, Trump is still promising to build the border wall, as prototypes of what the wall could look like sit in the San Diego, California, desert and border-crossings surge back to President Obama-era illegal immigration levels.
Since September 2017, eight border wall prototypes have sat in San Diego, being tested by U.S. Customs and Border Protection and toured countlessly by government officials.
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen toured the border wall prototypes in December 2017, telling Fox News that the wall was paramount to ending illegal immigration.
“We got to have a wall, we’re going to have a wall. But then you need the technology, you need the people, you need the censors, you need the cameras, you need the monitoring, to make sure that that wall is as effective as it can be,” Nielsen said.
A month later, Nielsen and the Trump administration have continued to struggle to secure the full $18 billion funding for the border wall from a Republican-controlled Congress that remains dedicated to the big business lobby’s interests on immigration, constantly demanding more legal immigration and continued access to illegal alien workers.
While the prototypes continue collecting dust in the San Diego region, border-crossings under Trump have surged back to where they were under Obama, a pattern that proves pro-American immigration reformers’ assertion that talk of cracking down on illegal immigration will only deter illegal immigrants from breaching the southern border for so long.
Between April 2017—when border-crossings hit a historic low—and December 2017, family unit border-crossings have surged 625 percent, Breitbart Texas reported, with the last month of 2017 even exceeding the number of border-crossings under Obama.
In the month of December alone, U.S. Border Patrol agents apprehended almost 30,000 illegal aliens trying to cross into the country between ports of entry, where Trump’s border wall would be sitting if it were constructed today.
As Breitbart News reported, for the last two months of 2017, the Republican establishment, Nielsen, and Democrats have floated the idea of giving amnesty to nearly 800,000 illegal aliens shielded from deportation by the President Obama-created Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
The mere talk of the DACA amnesty has coincided with surges in border-crossings, with Nielsen admitting last month that human smugglers on the southern border and future illegal aliens pay close attention to the national immigration debate in the U.S. to decide when will be the best time to cross into the country illegally.
Nearing the end of the first month of 2017, the Republican-controlled Congress has yet to hand over full funding for the border wall, and more importantly, have shifted focus to getting DACA illegal aliens a pathway to U.S. citizenship.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
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