The chants of “build the wall” that Congresswomen Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Lauren Boebert (R-CO) childishly attempted to initiate in the midst of President Biden’s State of the Union address last night may have been immature and disrespectful, but they were also likely motivated by a downright ill-informed and misguided idea of what Donald Trump’s border wall actually accomplished and how effective it has been.
In the real world — as opposed to the delusional white supremacist ideal of America — Trump’s money-wasting boondoggle has proven so easily breached that its status as a political ploy to convince more deplorables to vote Republican becomes perfectly clear.
According to The Washington Post, previously unpublished U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) maintenance records — which they obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request — demonstrate that smugglers shepherding refugees across the border have simply sawed through sections of the glorified fence 3,272 times over the past three years, an average of almost three border wall breaches per day.
“The government spent $2.6 million to repair the breaches during the 2019 to 2021 fiscal years, the CBP records show. While the agency has acknowledged that smugglers are able to hack through the new barriers built by the Trump administration, the maintenance records show damage has been more widespread than previously known, pointing to the structure’s limitations as an impediment to illegal crossings,” The Washington Post reports.
It’s not like the so-called “coyotes” and drug smugglers have to spend much to carve their way through the ineffective barrier.
“Smuggling gangs typically cut the barrier with inexpensive power tools widely available at retail hardware stores, including angle grinders and demolition saws. Once the 18-to-30-foot-tall bollards are severed near the ground, their only remaining point of attachment is at the top of the structure, leaving the steel beam dangling in the air. It easily swings open with a push, creating a gap wide enough for people and narcotics to pass through,” the newspaper states.
Luis Miranda, a spokesperson for CBP, tried to excuse the seemingly massive failure of the much-vaunted Trump’s folly by explaining that effective border security “requires a variety of resources and efforts, infrastructure, technology, and personnel.”
“No structure is impenetrable, so we will continue to work to focus resources on modern, effective border management measures to improve safety and security,” said Miranda in an official statement.
After falsely claiming that Mexico would pay for his medieval solution to modern immigration issues, Trump wound up spending around $11 billion in taxpayer money — much of it stolen from bloated Defense Department budgets — to build 458 miles of newly-constructed border wall, mostly in remote areas of New Mexico and Arizona.
The entire initiative now looks like a huge waste of money as smugglers don’t even need to use inexpensive power tools to breach the barriers. They can use equally primitive technology as the border wall itself — a ladder or a rope — to easily surmount the ineffective wall.
So much for the construction genius of Donald Trump.
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Original reporting by Nick Miroff at The Washington Post.
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