Abbott Says Trump Secured The Border Like No Other President
Former President Donald Trump joined Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Texas law enforcement officials at a border security briefing.
Abbott said Trump secured the border, “like no other president” and “kept Americans safe.”
He called President Joe Biden’s border policies, “amazing and disastrous,” pointing to an “800 percent increase” in encounters at the border last May compared to May 2020.
Abbott added that Vice President Kamala Harris is “misleading Americans” that by solving problems in triangle countries in Central America.
“People are coming in from other countries,” Abbott said. “One place to solve problems on the border is on the border. That is where needs to devout resources.”
He also discussed Texas’ recent efforts to protect the border and noted a “2000 percent increase” in fentanyl apprehensions by Texas Public Safety Department.
“People in Texas are pleading for us to help restore safety and security in their lives,” Abbott said.
“This is the job of the federal government,” he added. Abbott said Trump did that, but the Biden administration is failing.
What Do The Migrants Want
The migrants say they are leaving their respective countries in the hope of building a better future for themselves and their families.
Some say they have been threatened or mistreated by criminal gangs operating in their home towns. Many are travelling with their children whom they say they do not want to fall prey to the gangs.
Others hope to get jobs abroad which will pay enough for them to send money to their relatives who stayed behind.
How Trump Officials Used Covid
Salvadoran sisters Noeli, 15, and Valeria, 12, hoped to start an immigration case and reunite with their mother in Maryland after five years apart when they crossed the U.S.-Mexico border in August with their brother, Josue, 23. But U.S. border agents quickly turned them back to Mexico.
Grabriela, 13, hoped to apply for asylum when she reached the Texas border in April, just as her mother had done years earlier when she fled gangs in El Salvador. But after being apprehended by U.S. officials, the girl was detained in a hotel and then placed on a deportation flight.
After waiting months in Mexico’s violence-plagued Ciudad Juárez for her U.S. court hearing, Elida allowed her 12-year-old son Gustavo to present himself to U.S. border officials, thinking he would be allowed to reunite with his grandfather in South Carolina. Instead, Gustavo, a largely non-verbal boy with physical and learning disabilities, was expelled to Guatemala alone.
Prior to mid-March, these migrant children would have been housed in shelters and allowed to seek asylum or other forms of U.S. sanctuary with the help of lawyers. But their rapid expulsions from the U.S. are part of the Trump administration’s unprecedented efforts to use the COVID-19 pandemic as justification to sidestep legal protections for minors who arrive at America’s borders without documents.
In all, more than 204,000 of these expulsions have been carried out across the U.S.-Mexico border since March, according to government data.
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Trump: Biden Is Destroying Our Country And It All Started With The Fake Election
At the border wall in Pharr, Texas, Trump thanked the members of Congress present.
JUST NOW: Trump arrives at the border wall in Pharr, Texas #borderwall
John C. Moritz
Trump also continued to push the “big lie” about the 2020 presidential election fruad, claiming he won in many states even if “they don’t show that way.”
“We produced the safest, best border we’ve ever had and now in a short time it’s over,” Trump said.
“Biden is destroying our country and it all started with the fake election,” Trump said, criticizing the New York City mayoral election.
“The big one was won by a different person,” he said, and in two months the border wall would have been “perfecto.”
“We had a closed border, the best ever,” and now Trump says drugs and human traffickers are coming in.
“We had human traffickers down to a halt” and now they are “going at a level they’ve never seen,” he continued.
Trump also repeated comments from the earlier border security briefing about criminals and gang members coming across the border and about all of his immigration policies that President Biden ended.
At the end of his remarks, Trump teased a possible thrid run for president.
Trump just entertained a third run. As he wrapped up, a reporter just asked if Trump would apologize about Jan. 6. Crowd responded with booing.
Prototypes Under Construction For Us
Construction of eight border wall prototypes is under way as the Department of Homeland Security seeks to advance President Donald Trump’s landmark promise.
The construction includes four concrete wall prototypes and four prototypes using “other materials.” Construction began Sept. 26 in San Diego, Calif., close to the U.S.-Mexico border. The prototypes are expected to be finished near the end of October.
The prototypes will be designed to deter illegal immigration in the area where they are constructed and be between 18 to 30 feet high, U.S. Customs and Border Protection said in a .
“Moving forward with the prototypes enables us to continue to incorporate all the tools necessary to secure our border,” Ronald Vitiello, CBP acting deputy commissioner, said in the news release.
In an announcing contracts awarded for concrete prototypes, Vitiello said officials will examine the prototypes’ aesthetics, how penetrable and resistant they are to tampering, and their anti-scaling or anti-climb features. Those contracts ranged from just under $400,000 to just under $500,000.
“There’s still a lot to do, right. We are going to build four prototypes for concrete and then we are going to build four other materials, and then we are going to make decisions about which is most appropriate for which location,” Vitiello said.
Evaluation of prototypes will take 30 to 60 days, he said.
Companies building concrete border wall prototypes include the following:
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The Journal Jama Surgery Offers One Of The First Attempts To Measure Injuries And Deaths Resulting From Falls Along New Sections Of The Wall
SAN DIEGO In the trauma wards of this citys major hospitals, patients from the border have arrived every day with gruesome injuries: skull fractures, broken vertebrae and shattered limbs, their lower extremities twisted into deranged angles.
The patients have fallen from new 30-foot segments of President Donald Trumps border wall, a structure he touted as a Rolls-Royce that cant be climbed. His administration built more formidable barriers in the San Diego area than anywhere else along the southern border, with miles of double-layer steel fencing, but that has not stopped more and more migrants from trying to scale it.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials say they do not tally deaths and injuries resulting from such falls. But new statistics published Friday by University of California at San Diego physicians in the journal JAMA Surgery provide one of the first attempts to measure the toll.
Since 2019, when the barriers height was raised to 30 feet along much of the border in California, the number of patients arriving at the UC San Diego Medical Centers trauma ward after falling off the structure has jumped fivefold, to 375, the physicians found. Falling deaths at the barrier went from zero to 16 during that time, according to the report, citing records maintained by the San Diego county medical examiner.
Opiniontrump’s Wall Is Not A New Concept Authoritarians Have Built Them For Centuries
But López Obrador is not the only one allowing Trump to do whatever he wants to do in the region. The Trump “wall” of agreements to enforce American immigration policy for us extends well into Central America, and includes new third party agreements to upend the process for migrants to receive asylum in America that we have made with Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador where political leaders desperate for American aid are more than willing to criticize the American president one minute and enforce his policies the next.
Trump’s ability to get others to do his dirty work speaks to how the U.S. can still play the bully around its own backyard.
And while the virtual wall expands south, the real one is being constructed, at least in small sections, in the American southwest. From the looks of how acquiescent Central American leaders have been to Trump’s demands, however, the physical wall might not actually be needed.
Mexico is not just being asked to play the role of Trump’s virtual wall against Central American migrants Mexican migrants are now falling victim to the other walls Trump has been building. Yes, even as Mexico continues its role as Trumps enforcer, the U.S. has begun using its agreement with Guatemala to send Mexican asylum-seekers detained at the U.S. border to that third country.
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Disrupting Wildlife Refuges And Parks
Proposals under consideration would locate the wall through seven Texas wildlife conservation areas, including the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge and Big Bend National Park, prized among national parks as a place so remote it is considered to be one of the best place in the Lower 48 to view the night sky.
In Mission, Texas, the National Butterfly Center, where more than 200 butterfly species live near the banks of the Rio Grande, has been notified that the wall will divide the 100-acre sanctuary, placing almost 70 percent of it on the Mexican side. Plans also call for bisecting a wildlife refuge and state park, placing most of the land on the Mexican side.
After ferocious objections, Homeland Security shelved plans to build the wall through the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge in Alamo, Texas, where more than 400 species of birds, banded armadillos, and endangered wildcats live.
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Most Of The Wall Isn’t ‘wall’ At All
As well as scaling back his ambitions for the length of the border barrier, Mr Trump has also changed his view of what constitutes a wall.
Throughout his 2016 election campaign, when he described it, he talked about concrete.
But once elected, he began referring to a barrier made of steel, which would enable border agents to see through it.
And what has been built so far is mostly such steel fencing.
Specifically, much of the current wave of construction is 18-30ft reinforced bollard fencing, according to a report by the non-partisan Congressional Research Service.
“It poses a formidable barrier, but it is not the high, thick masonry structure that most dictionaries term a ‘wall’,” the report states.
However, the report adds that while the new barriers may not be made of concrete and in many cases replace existing structures, they do pose “a new obstacle that changes the calculus of those attempting to cross the border between ports of entry”.
Having said that, although Mr Trump’s barriers are not themselves made of concrete, they have been constructed using a significant amount of it, according to CBP.
Some 774,000 cubic yards of concrete have been used in construction so far, alongside 539,000 tonnes of steel.
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Whether The Government Is Required To Detain All Asylum Seekers
In ordering the Biden administration to resume the Remain in Mexico policy, the lower courts held that immigration law limits the federal government to only two options when people seek asylum at the border: detain them or forcibly return them to Mexico before their hearing. Since the Department of Homeland Security lacks capacity to detain all people seeking asylum, the judge reasoned that the only choice would be to send them to Mexico while their cases proceed.
This is a patently false choice. Congress has stipulated that DHS has broad power to avoid unnecessarily detaining people and to release people to their networks of care while their immigration cases proceed. In fact, all presidential administrations have exercised broad discretion to release people rather than restricting DHS to two binary choices including the Trump administration itself.
A Key Migrant Camp Is Emptying
Thousands who have made the journey to the southern US border have found refuge in temporary border communities – often in shanty towns with little infrastructure or resources and vulnerable to pressure from violent organised-crime gangs.
According to Human Rights Watch, these migrants are under threat from criminal organisations which kidnap them on the assumption that they have relatives in the US who could be extorted for money.
In the town of Matamoros, across the border from Brownsville, Texas, hundreds of people set up one such camp in 2018 near the entry point, in the scrubland on the banks of the Rio Grande.
Charities such as the World Food Kitchen, the Dignity Village collective and Global Response Management provide food, tents, clothing and medical care to those living in the camp, where around 50% of residents are under the age of 15.
But Andrea Leiner, director of strategic planning for GRM, says coronavirus and July’s Hurricane Hanna have had dire consequences.
Coronavirus restrictions have meant the border has been closed for all but essential travel and immigration hearings have been postponed.
Hurricane Hanna not only brought floods to the camp but also caused an infestation of rats, snakes and mosquitoes, forcing many residents to flee.
Ms Leiner says the repeated blows of plague, famine, and hurricane, on top of the legal restrictions, have drained people of hope.
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Displaced Ukrainians Seeking Asylum
When Ukraine was attacked by Russia in early 2022, many Ukrainian refugees fled to Mexico to seek asylum at the U.S. border.
U.S. authorities opened the El Chaparral port of entry outside of Tijuana, Mexico in April 2022 to allow for the processing of Ukrainian refugees specifically. Their humanitarian parole lasts one year.
How Much ‘new Wall’ Trump Has Built Is Up For Debate
Any calculation of the miles of new wall constructed by Mr Trump and his administration depends very much on the definition of the words “new” and “wall”.
Before he took office, there were 654 miles of barrier along the southern border – made up of 354 miles of barricades to stop pedestrians and 300 miles of anti-vehicle fencing.
Now, according to US Customs and Border Protection in its 6 October status report, the southern border has 669 miles of “primary barrier” – the first structure people heading from Mexico to the US will encounter – and 65 miles of “secondary barrier” – which usually runs behind the primary structure as a further obstacle.
This means that in areas where no barricades existed before, they have built 15 miles of new, primary barrier or “border wall system”, as it is called by CBP.
ââAbout a further 350 miles of barrier has been built, according to CBP, made up of replacement structures and some new secondary barrier.
More is planned, too, with 378 miles of new and replacement barrier either under construction or in the “pre-construction phase”. Less than half of this will be in locations where no barriers currently exist, according to CBP.
However, Mr Trump himself doesn’t make a distinction between these new stretches of barrier and replacement structures, regarding both as new wall.
This is because, he says, replacements involve “complete demolition and rebuilding of old and worthless barriers”.
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Former Dph Acting Secretary Chad Wolf Among Border Security Briefing Attendees
Among those in attendance are newly elected McAllen Mayor Javier Villalobos, DPS Director Steven McCraw, Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, former Department of Homeland Security acting secretary Chad Wolf and former Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Mark Morgan.
Among the guests today, Mark Morgan, former CBP Commissioner, and Chad Wolf, former acting DHS secretary.
Valerie Gonzalez
Other attendees include Brooks County Sheriff Benny Martinez, Paul Perez, president of the National Border Patrol Council RGV 3307, National Border Patrol Council President Brandon Judd and Susan Kibbe, director of the South Texans Property Rights Association, MyRGV News reports.
Non-border county sheriffs and Texas representatives are also set to join the briefing.
What The Wall Would Mean For Crime In The Us
Although President Trump has railed against the carnage of crime in the United States, the crime statistics, with few exceptions, tell a very different story.
From 1991 to 2015, U.S. homicides fell 36%
In 2014, 14,249 people were murdered, the lowest homicide rate since 1991 when there were 24,703, and part of a pattern of steady decline in violent crime over that entire period. In 2015, however, murders in the U.S. did shoot up to 15,696. This increase was largely driven by three citiesBaltimore, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. Baltimore and Chicago have decreasing populations, and all three have higher poverty and unemployment than the national average, high income and racial inequality, and troubled relations between residents and policeconditions conducive to a rise in violent crime. In 2016, homicides fell in Washington and Baltimore, but continued rising in Chicago.
There is no evidence, however, that undocumented residents accounted for either the rise in crime or even for a substantial number of the crimes, in Chicago or elsewhere. The vast majority of violent crimes, including murders, are committed by nativeborn Americans. Multiple criminological studies show that foreignborn individuals commit much lower levels of crime than do the nativeborn. In California, for example, where there is a large immigrant population, including of undocumented migrants, U.S.born men were incarcerated at a rate 2.5 times higher than foreignborn men.
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Trump Did Get Mexico To Build A Wall Of Its Troops On Its Own Southern Border
Donald Trump has actually kept the main promise of his 2016 campaign, because Mexico is paying for a “border wall.” The only thing is that its not a physical wall and its not on the southwest border: Its a wall of Mexican National Guard members on the border between Mexico and Guatemala, working to keep Trump’s promises to the American people in the name of Mexican national security… and capitulation to their northern neighbor.
That wall was put to the test after thousands of Honduran migrants arrived at a bridge connecting southern Mexico and Guatemala on Saturday, clashing with Mexico’s National Guard after Mexican authorities shut down the bridge and attempted to stop the migrants from making unauthorized entry elsewhere in the border region by promising those that registered for asylum in Mexico that they could obtain jobs there.
