Washington Post: Donald Trump Will Transfer $7.2 Billion for Border Wall
3:49
President Donald Trump will transfer another $7.2 billion from Pentagon accounts in 2020 to build the promised border wall, according to the Washington Post.
The paper reported January 13 that the president would use his national emergency powers to:
divert an additional $7.2 billion in Pentagon funding for border wall construction this year, five times what Congress authorized him to spend on the project in the 2020 budget, according to internal planning figures obtained by The Washington Post.The Pentagon funds would be extracted, for the second year in a row, from military construction projects and counternarcotics funding. According to the plans, the funding would give the government enough money to complete [a total of] approximately 885 miles of new fencing by spring 2022, far more than the 509 miles the administration has slated for the U.S. border with Mexico.
The pending transfer, if not blocked by Congress or the courts, would bump up his border wall spending to $18.4 billion.
So far, Trump’s deputies have built a little over 100 miles of upgraded “wall system” and are in the process of planning and building another 350 miles.
Chad Wolf, the acting chief of the Department of Homeland Security, admitted last week that the agency will not meet the president’s target of 450 miles by election day. “I can tell you right now that we remain confident that we are on track to [reach] 400, 450 miles that are either completed or under construction by the end of 2020,” Wolf told attendees at a January 10 press conference in Yuma, Arizona.
Pro-migration groups, including advocates for cheap labor, are funding lawsuits to block Trump’s border policies. But a federal appeals court released $3.6 billion in border wall funding on January 8 that had been blocked by a lawsuit. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans lifted the curbs while the Department of Justice prepares to appeal a lower judge’s decision to block the spending because of the lawsuit.
Officials say the border wall helps agents reduce illegal migration and shrink the transfer of drugs into Americans’ communities and young people.
The drug problem is especially bad in the towns that were damaged by the federal government’s support for free trade and the cheap labor stimulus for Wall Street. Breitbart News reported December 30:
The study by acclaimed researchers, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, notes that American communities that experienced an auto plant closure within the last five years saw a much greater rate of opioid deaths than communities whose auto plants have remained open — confirming that towns and small cities that have been hit by job-killing free trade have suffered more in the opioid crisis.The researchers note:“US manufacturing counties that experienced an automotive assembly plant closure were compared with counties in which automotive plants remained open from 1999 to 2016. Automotive assembly plant closures were associated with a statistically significant increase in county-level opioid overdose mortality rates among adults aged 18 to 65 years.” [Emphasis added]
Trump has also used diplomacy to build a series of legal agreements with Mexico and Central American countries that may allow border officials to return nearly all migrants to Central America, without allowing them to file for asylum, even if they traveled from African or India. The legal agreements will help bump up wages for blue-collar Americans — but will do little to raise white-collar salaries.
Video shows climbers surmounting border wall
Trump claimed 'impossible to climb'
THE NEW YORK TIMES IS MEX OWNED AND SUBSTANTIALLY NOTHING BUT A
MOUTHPIECE FOR LA RAZA 'The Race'
Jared Kushner Fails Up, Again
ANN COULTER EXPOSES TRUMP’S “WALL” HOAX
In fact, Trump is steadily moving in the precise opposite
direction of what he promised.
Illegal immigration is on track to hit the highest levels in
more than a decade, and Trump has willfully decided to keep amnesty advocates
Jared, Ivanka, Mick Mulvaney, Marc Short, and Mercedes Schlapp in the White
House. For all his talk about immigration, did he ever consider hiring people
who share his MAGA vision?
Video shows climbers surmounting border wall
Trump claimed 'impossible to climb'
by Ellie Bufkin
A popular video clip shows two climbers
using a ladder and rope to successfully cross a border wall President Trump
claimed was "impossible to climb."
In a visit to the southern border in
September, Trump claimed that portions of newly built wall along the
U.S.-Mexico border near Tijuana were reinforced and even "championship
mountain climbers" were unable to cross them. A video posted by
photojournalist J. Omar Ornelas, however, shows two individuals using a ladder
and other tools to cross the border successfully.
The president also noted
the recent throttle in
immigration numbers and credited the newly built wall. "People aren't even
coming up," Trump said. "You see the numbers are going way down, and
we're not doing a catch and release anymore."
The video of the climbers was widely
shared as critics of Trump's border wall policy championed the effort of the
migrant climbers to disprove the president's claim. Several hundred miles of
border wall are currently under construction at the southern border,
though no
new fencing has been completed since Trump took office.
While the "impossible to
climb" claim was disproven, the Department of Homeland Security claims the
wall's efficacy cannot be understated. "When it comes to stopping drugs
and illegal aliens from crossing our borders, border walls have proven to be
extremely effective," a statement said. "Border security relies
on a combination of border infrastructure, technology, personnel and partnerships
with law enforcement at the state, local, tribal, and federal level. For
example, when we installed a border wall in the Yuma Sector, we have seen
border apprehensions decrease by 90 percent."
THE NEW YORK TIMES IS MEX OWNED AND SUBSTANTIALLY NOTHING BUT A
MOUTHPIECE FOR LA RAZA 'The Race'
Jared Kushner Fails Up, Again
Having solved the Middle East, the president’s son-in-law tackles the
border wall.
Opinion Columnist
Ivanka
Trump and Jared Kushner, who, reports say, has been given the job of overseeing
construction of a wall between Mexico and the United States.Credit...Anna
Moneymaker/The New York Times
Jared
Kushner just got a promotion. Another one. At
least I think we can call it that, and it’s a deliciously perfect assignment.
The pallid princeling is now responsible for speeding construction of the
border wall. In other words, a make-believe fixer will oversee a fairy-tale
fix.
Josh
Dawsey and Nick Miroff of The Washington Post broke
the news, and when I read it, I realized that I hadn’t
heard much about Jared — or, for that matter, Ivanka — in a good long while.
They’re front and center when the administration is announcing some ostensibly
sensible initiative or claiming a pittance of progress. But when its corruption
is being exposed and the drizzle of subpoenas becomes a downpour, they vanish,
cuddling for warmth under the gilded umbrella of their hallucinatory virtue.
We can
pretty much chart the weather of the administration by the relative visibility
of Donald Jr., so loud and hirsute, and Jared, so smooth-cheeked and mute.
Donald Jr. thrives when it’s nastiest, stomping gleefully through the muck.
Jared comes out only if his suit won’t get dirty or his hair wet.
During the impeachment inquiry, we’ve seen a lot
of Donald Jr. That’s partly because he has been hawking his new book, copies of
which the Republican National Committee spent nearly $100,000 on. But
it’s also because he’s such a ready, eager conduit for his father’s wrath, with
a talent for exaggeration and misdirection that’s clearly chromosomal.
Jared and Ivanka have been strategically scarce,
though Ivanka did flutter into view, in a fashion, when President Trump boasted
two weeks ago that she had created 14 million jobs since
the inauguration. “Fourteen million and going up!” he clarified, lest anyone
get the misimpression that she thought her work was done. Never! On behalf of
the American people, Ivanka is tireless. There’s no rest for the weary, and there’s
even less of it for those who live at the crossroads of self-infatuation and
delusion.
In an
interview last month on Fox Business, Ivanka said that
she and Dad were “fighting every day for the American worker” and that she was
determined to “drive hard every single day to make an impact.”
“Your
time and service — our time here — is finite,” she mused, and while I’d love to
believe that she was prophesying her and her father’s imminent eviction from
the White House, I think she was referring, in her deeply spiritual way, to the
span of a human life. “It’s sand through an hourglass.” As Ivanka serves us,
she never forgets the sand.
Democrats believe that the Trump administration’s
void of ethics will sour American voters on the president. But those voters are
likelier to abandon him for the administration’s vacuum of competence — for his
nonsensical managerial style, captured in his magical thinking about Jared.
He tasked
Jared with reinventing the federal government. Unless constant rash firings,
unfilled jobs and shakedowns of foreign governments constitute reinvention, this
remains on Jared’s infinite to-do list. The
president put Jared in charge of brokering a durable peace between Israelis and
Palestinians. Insert punch line here. He followed Jared’s counsel that faith be placed in Saudi Arabia and
its crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. We know how that worked out.
The
president somehow looked at that track record and decided that the dynamo he
should entrust with his central campaign
promise — a secure barrier between the United States and Mexico — was … Jared!
And so we have the trillionth gorgeous example of his investment in fiction.
Nearly
three years into Trump’s presidency, the border wall barely exists. Subtract
the upgrading of fencing and such that was already there and Trump has, by some recent estimates,
constructed
fewer than 25 miles of actually new barrier. The southwestern border is nearly
2,000 miles long.
But Jared
is on the case! According to The Post, he “convenes biweekly meetings in the
West Wing, where he questions an array of government officials about progress”
and “explains the president’s wishes.” Huh. Those wishes are hardly cryptic,
and how complicated can this questioning be? Already, The Post reported,
there’s grumbling that Jared is just an annoyance.
That
belittles his symbolic significance. Many journalists, including me, have tried
to settle on the perfect mascot for the Trump administration. There are choices
galore. The greedy, vainglorious Scott Pruitt, who did his best to decimate the
Environmental Protection Agency, fit the bill, but
he’s long gone. Mike Pompeo embodies the Faustian arc of
so many of the president’s aides and allies, from principle-driven dismissal of
Trump during the 2016 campaign to reputation-torching submission when he
dangled a ticket to the big time.
But for
naked opportunism and situational scruples, Jared’s my guy. Remember how he and
Ivanka were going to contain the president’s ego, blunt his cruelty, whisper
sweet moderation in his ear? That was then. Now he’s devoting himself to an
exorbitant, unnecessary monument to Trump’s nativism and xenophobia.
There’s
an upside, though. With Jared in the saddle, this horse won’t go far.
DHS Chief Admits Will Not Build 450-Mile Border Wall by November
4:10
The government will not have 450 miles of border wall built by the end of 2020, homeland security chief Chad Wolf said at a press event, where he touted the completed construction of 100 miles of wall.
“I can tell you right now that we remain confident that we are on track to [reach] 400, 450 miles that are either completed or under construction by the end of 2020,” Wolf told attendees at a press conference in Yuma, Arizona.
The “or under construction” language admits there is little likelihood that the Department of Homeland Security will be able to meet President Donald Trump’s goal of building 500 miles of wall by November, despite the release this week of $3.6 billion in Pentagon money for the wall project.
On December 25, 2018, Trump told reporters “It is my hope to have this done, completed, all 500 to 550 miles, to have it either renovated or brand new, by election time.”
Trump’s deputies recently echoed the goal. In August 2019, the Washington Post reported:
CBP and Pentagon officials insist they remain on track to complete about 450 miles of fencing by the election. Of that, about 110 miles will be added to areas where there is currently no barrier. The height of the structure will vary between 18 and 30 feet, high enough to inflict severe injury or death from a fall.
As Wolf admitted the wall would not be completed, he said the construction of the first 100 miles is a big win:
We have built more walls in the three years of this administration than the entire eight years of the last administration. So I think that’s first and foremost.We have reduced time [delays] from appropriations [in Congress] to shovel-in-the-ground from two years to nine months, and we also continue to work with our great partners with the Corps of Engineers to make sure that we have the land acquisition needed to build to build the wall. I will also say that we’re continuing to assess the 30-day … delay that we had in that a court injunction.So that’s going to impact as well. But I can tell you right now that we remain confident that we are on track to 400, 450 miles that are either completed or under construction by the end of 2020.
The first 100 miles of construction has replaced easily-bypassed walls, including the low walls that were constructed from the airstrip landing mats designed to help pave military airfields.
The shortcomings in DHS’s wall-building projects, however, are partly offset by huge diplomatic deals that Trump and DHS officials have won with the countries south of the U.S. border.
The main deal with Mexico has allowed officials to send more than 55,000 Central American migrants back to Mexico, so preventing them from getting U.S. jobs as they wait for much-delayed asylum hearings. The denial of U.S. jobs is a huge deterrent to migrants, because migrants know they will not be able to repay their smuggling loans if they cannot get U.S. jobs.
Other deals will allow officials to fly arriving migrants to other countries throughout the region, and so prevent them from even filing for asylum in the United States. “Hondurans and Salvadorans get sent to Guatemala and Guatemalans get sent to Honduras,” said a tweet from Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, an advocate at the pro-migration American Immigration Council. “None of them get to apply for asylum here.”
Wolf told the press conference that 96 migrants were recently flown to Guatemala so they could seek asylum in that country. Only one migrant did seek asylum, while the others went back to their home countries, he said.
“75 Hondurans and 53 Salvadorans have been sent to Guatemala as part of the Asylum Cooperation Agreement with the United States,” said a January 10 tweet from a journalist in Central America. “Of those 128 people, only 9 have applied for refuge in Guatemala. Of those 9, 5 have abandoned the process.”
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