President Donald Trump and his agency deputies are showing off the border wall as it extends 216 miles along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Officials have started building another 339 miles and are sketching plans for an additional 183 miles, according to Mark Morgan, the acting commissioner for the United States Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Trump has directed $15 billion in funding, which is enough for roughly 738 miles of wall, including associated roads, cameras, and communication networks, he said.
“We’re on pace to complete 450 miles by the end of the year and 500 miles almost immediately thereafter,” Trump said at a June 23 roundtable in Yuma, Arizona.
“Today, we’re averaging about seven miles per week,” says an agency video.
The border wall is greatly boosted by Trump’s diplomatic deals with Mexico and Central America, and by his reforms to the nation’s asylum and migration laws. Those legal changes have slashed the cross border flow by two-thirds, so allowing quicker deportation of the smaller number of border crossers.
In 2019, roughly 630,000 women and children crossed through the border via the legal loopholes created by President Barack Obama and his allied judges and agency officials. In the first seven months of 2020, the flow plunged to 22,000, most of whom are quickly sent home via Trump’s diplomatic deals with Mexico and Central American countries.
These critical legal fights include losses and gains. For example, on June 18, the Supreme Court directed Trump’s deputies to restart their effort to withdraw work permits given to roughly 700,000 illegal ‘”DACA” migrants. But on June 23, Trump won a legal victory in a D.C. courtroom allowing his agency officials to begin the fast-track “expedited removal” process to deport illegal migrants caught inside the United States. Politico reported:
The plan the appeals court greenlighted Monday would allow authorities to use the sped-up process with alleged illegal immigrants picked up anywhere in the country who appear to have been in the U.S. for less than two years. The process typically bypasses immigration judges and provides for no review of their decisions in the cases where they are brought in.
But the illegal migrants are tough and determined to get jobs in the United States. That means more young men and women are trying to sneak illegally through the border — which means they have to get around or through Trump’s expanding border wall.
Roughly 275,000 single adults were caught at the border in 2019 — and roughly 150,000 have been caught in the first nine months of 2020.
The exclusion of migrants is great for blue-collar Americans because it allows them to earn higher wages, pay lower rents, and send their kids to less-crowded schools. Those gains are losses for white-collar corporate executives, wealthy professionals, and shareholders, who have to pay higher wages and to receive lower stock market gains.