The US Already Has a Border Wall with Mexico and It's Basically Useless Keegan Hamilton - VICE News
go to original November 4, 2016

When Chris Cabrera joined the U.S. Border Patrol in 2003, the job involved cruising through vast open stretches of the Rio Grande Valley trying to catch drug smugglers and migrants coming across the Texas-Mexico border. Three years later, the United States began building a fence that was supposed to keep these people out and make his job easier. It quickly became obvious it wasn’t going to have the desired effect.

“We came with this 18-foot wall, and the very next day they had 19-foot ladders,” Cabrera recalled recently. “It got to the point where we had so many ladders at the station that they told us to stop bringing the ladders in. It was just insane the number of ladders we had. Hundreds upon hundreds.”

One of the key promises of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is to build a bigger, better wall along the entire 1,933-mile border with Mexico, one that is both “impenetrable and beautiful.” The Republican nominee says the barricade will halt the northward flow of both immigrants and drugs. His supporters are enthusiastic about the idea, and Republicans made building a border wall a key tenet of the party’s official platform this year.



As Trump noted during the final presidential debate, Hillary Clinton has also supported creating a physical barrier between the U.S. and Mexico: She was one of 25 Democratic senators to vote for the Secure Fence Act of 2006. Clinton has promised in this campaign to implement comprehensive immigration reform, and she has also said the U.S. needs “to have secure borders, and what that will take is a combination of technology and a physical barrier.”

But people who actually live along the border in the Rio Grande Valley are extremely skeptical. Border Patrol agents like Cabrera, local police, elected officials, and people who live with the existing wall in their backyards say it has been an epic boondoggle. Seemingly everyone in the area agrees that any plan to build a new wall or expand the existing fence is a bad idea.

Read the rest at VICE News

Related: “Best of Luck with the Wall”: Donald Trump’s Mexico Wall Isn’t That Easy (Salon)

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