Trump’s Attorney General Nominee William Barr Built a Border Wall the Last Time He Ran the Justice Department.
It Failed Miserably
Barr’s solution to the immigration crisis was, in a way, decades ahead of its time: the construction of a heavily armored steel fence along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Scott Bixby
01.14.19 5:09 AM ET
In February 1992, less than three months into his first stint as the federal government’s top lawyer, Attorney General William Pelham Barr told a gathering of more than 100 law enforcement officials in San Diego that under his leadership, the U.S. Department of Justice would finally solve the looming immigration crisis at the border.
Barr’s proposed solution was, in its way, decades ahead of its time: the construction of a heavily armored steel fence along the U.S.-Mexico border immediately south of San Diego, complete with lighting, motion sensors, and the addition of hundreds of Border Patrol agents.
The fence was not “a silver bullet,” Barr admitted in his speech, but “a steady march in the right direction” to preventing undocumented immigrants from entering the country with impunity.
Unfortunately for Barr, the fence was an epic failure.
Though Barr saw the barrier as a novel way to stop undocumented immigrants from “crashing through the back door and the back window, violating our laws, flouting our sovereignty and ignoring our process,” as he told law enforcement in that speech, border-crossers took little notice of the latest hurdle.
“It doesn’t matter how many people, horses, bicycles, helicopters or planes they use,” one migrant told The Washington Post one week after Barr’s speech. “People will go. It doesn’t matter if the fence is electric—we’ll fry, but we’re still going.”
Migrants simply hopped it, dug under it, sprinted past Border Patrol when they weren’t looking, or walked its length to enter the United States through the rougher terrain of the San Ysidro Mountains. And they’ve been doing so ever since.
“The deterrent effect of tens of billions of dollars in investments in Barr’s approach to immigration control never materialized,” said Professor Wayne Cornelius, an expert on the mass politics of immigration at the University California, San Diego, who criticized Barr’s proposal at the time as a “Keystone Kops” approach to immigration enforcement, both inflammatory and ineffective.
more:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-attorney-general-nominee-william-barr-built-a-border-wall-the-last-time-he-ran-the-justice-department-it-failed-miserably?via=newsletter&source=DDMorning
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