Illegal immigration is going down. And so is crime on the American side of the border with Mexico, officials with Customs and Border Protection say.
The reason? President Trump’s border wall is going up. Even better, CBP says illegal aliens who hope to cross the border will confront more than 400 miles of new wall by year’s end.
All that new wall could cover all but about 70 miles of the U.S. border from the Pacific to Arizona’s line with New Mexico.
CBP Data
CBP offered the following figures on new sections of wall: 76 miles of new wall are complete, 157 miles are under construction, and another 276 miles are in preconstruction.
The building has required 88,000 tons of steel and 150,000 tons of concrete.
All that effort hasn’t just slowed attempts to cross the border illegally. “Since the completion of the border wall system in Calexico,” CBP reported, “overall crime in the area has been reduced making the community a safer place to live and to work. Areas once considered dangerous are now secure.”
That tweet features a video with Joshua C. Devack, the assistant chief patrol agent for the El Centro Border Sector, who reported that the new bollard walls are 30 feet high and fortified with more lights and electronic surveillance. The previous “barrier,” he said, was quickly cut and climbed because it was designed to block cars and trucks.
On Thursday, CBP reported, it will have completed 450 miles of new wall by year’s end.
“The frontline men and women of @CBP tell me walls work and help them do their job,” acting CBP chief Mark Morgan said. “That matters. And while not everyone who crosses the border is bad, this wall is important to protect USBP agents and to stop drugs and criminals from entering your communities.”
In its dispatch on the new wall, Breitbart.com reported that CBP has spent $292 million on 40 miles of wall in the San Diego, El Centro, and El Paso border sectors. As well, Breitbart reported, another $49 million is being used to build 35 border gates to close gaps in the Rio Grande Valley Sector.
CBP officials report approximately 509 miles of new border wall systems are identified for construction projects. These projects will be funded by a combination of Department of Homeland Security and Department of Defense funding and proceeds from the Treasury Forfeiture Fund. Those plans include approximately 141 miles of new primary walls, 24 miles of new primary levee walls, 68 miles of replacement primary walls for dilapidated designs, 205 miles for primary walls replacing existing vehicle barriers, 14 miles of secondary walls in place of dilapidated designs, and 57 miles of new secondary walls.
Numbers Down
The new wall, as well as Mexico’s crackdown on illegals traversing its territory from Guatemala, is likely responsible for a dramatic drop in CBP’s apprehensions at and between ports of entry.
Though it has not published detailed data on the illegals that Border Patrol agents apprehended in September, the agency did release an overall figure of 52,546.
That figure is an 18-percent drop from the August figure of 64,006, and a 63.6 percent drop from the year’s high in May, 144,255.
Added to the 926,769 illegals apprehended through August brings the total for fiscal 2019 to 979,315.
The latest reports from CBP detail a building effort that likely would have been impossible had the U.S. Supreme Court not overturned a lower federal court’s injunction that would have stopped President Trump from using military money for the wall.
But the hate-Trump open-borders lobby promised to continue its fight to flood the country with Third World denizens who will, when they become citizens and voters, cast ballots for the Democrat Party.
Until then, more wall goes up on the border.
Photo: Sherry Smith / iStock / Getty Images Plus
R. Cort Kirkwood is a longtime contributor to The New American and a former newspaper editor.
