Based On The Facts There Is Absolutely No Excuse Now To Try To Erect A Border Wall

In all the brouhaha of Trump and his distractions and lies the message becomes muddled because he knows full well that is the only way he will get his base's coveted wall. People that love the truth will go with the facts. People that don't, evidently don't love the truth or the Author of truth. They want what they want regardless. Their baseless selfish fear becomes their "god".

The first truth is that both the Senate and the House have passed bills to open the government. Only Trump has refused. The truth here is obvious, the majority of the 3 branches of government want the shutdown over, only Trump doesn't.

Another truth is that the Republicans are so afraid of Trump getting political damage that Senate leader Mitch McConnell will not now allow a vote in the Senate. With everyone's attention on it now, another vote in the Senate will clearly and without doubt show that only Trump and his misguided base is now the obstacle.

What all this shows is crystal clear. As it stands now the Republicans are the obstacle to putting real pressure on the president and so begin to own the shutdown as much as Trump.

So being in the now, let's digest the facts and events that have evolved now.

Mike Pence said, "we have seen more than 4,000 known or suspected terrorists attempt to come into our country through various means." He is trying to link that to the southern border but it is extremely misleading. We know the vast majority of those people who've been apprehended come in through airports. It's a misleading claim we have heard the government say again and again. And, in fact, we have government's own numbers in this case that looked at the terrorist threat on the southern border.

This is from a State Department report in 2017 -  "There are no known international terrorist organizations operating in Mexico, no credible info that any member of a terrorist group has traveled through Mexico to gain access to the U.S." 

In the first half of 2018, there are believed to be six known or suspected terrorists who entered the country, none of them from our southern border. 

The administration continues to make the argument there are dangerous people coming across. Who are they, could they be referring to?

So, there's two other numbers we have heard repeated again and again. And we dug into them to figure out, who are these groups they're talking about?

In a briefing yesterday, Homeland Security Secretary Nielsen cited these numbers. She cited a group of special interest aliens, 3,000 of them, she said, who were encountered on the southern border last year, in addition, 17,000 convicted criminals who were stopped at the southern border last year.

Let's just take those piece by piece for a second. The special interest aliens, all those are, are a group of people who come from different countries that may require a second look, either because of the nature of terrorism or threats in their home country or because of their travel patterns. Those are not suspected terrorists.

The libertarian Cato Institute actually looked at the group in-depth. They did a huge comprehensive study. And they found, from 1975 to 2017, that those groups from special interest aliens, there were seven of them in that — all of those years who entered illegally who were convicted of planning a terrorist attack, and none of them actually successfully carried out the attack.

And none of them, Judy, actually entered on the southern border. And most of them actually came in from our northern border. The 17,000 criminal convictions, what we can say about that is, I went to a DHS source and said, what are those convictions? They don't have a breakdown. But they did say many of those convictions were for previous illegal entries.

The other argument the administration is making is, there's a humanitarian crisis at the border.

There's absolutely a humanitarian crisis and it starts all the way down in Central America, makes its way all the way up to our border. Here's what Secretary Nielsen had to say yesterday about that in the briefing. She cited 60,000 children sent here unaccompanied at the border, 30 percent of the women who are raped on the journey, seven out of 10 that are the victims of violence.

We know these folks from these Central American countries who are fleeing violence and instability. They have a dangerous journey along the way. None of those are things that we have direct control over.


The things that we have control over in our government, kind of creating a crisis of our own. We know that volume is not the problem. Historically, border crossings are at an all-time low. If you take a look at border apprehensions over the years, over the last 20 years, that's an 81 percent decline. Volume is not the issue.

We have handled many, many more people, many hundreds of thousands more people a month. The difference is demographics. We now have more families, meaning parents and guardians, with children coming to our borders. Take a look at those numbers. Those have been going up over the last five years. It's a 400 percent increase.


And that has taxed our system in ways it wasn't meant to handle. We were built as an immigration system to handle single men. We're not built to handle the families and children. It's creating a backlog through the whole system.

The president has pointed out a few other threats that are of course valid.

He has said about the nature of drugs coming across the border — just on Friday, he said drugs are pouring into this country. They don't go through the ports of entry. When they do, they sometimes get caught. We know that there's elicit narcotics trafficking flowing back and forth. We know it's a problem, and the violence that comes with it too.

Statistically, those illicit drugs come through legal ports of entry. A wall wouldn't really do much to stop it. And we have DEA data that actually debunks that too.

Trump also say's that the wall could act as a deterrent, it'll send a message that people cannot illegally enter.

The problem is, historically, that hasn't worked. In previous administrations and this one, anything we have done as a deterrent, whether it was pamphleting in Mexico, or putting families and children in mass detention — and these were in previous administrations, by the way — or family separation in this one, it hasn't worked, because the conditions on the ground these people are fleeing have not changed.

- excerpts from PBS Newshour with Amna Nawaz  and Judy Woodruff


If we are going to build a wall based on poor immigrants and little else as the facts show what have we become that the founding fathers of this nation would be proud of? A bunch of wilting ninnies?
Trump manipulated his base through fear and fear of outsiders to work up his voting bloc in 2016, now he is going to have to take responsibility for those lies and manipulation. There is the childishness of Trump and then there is his wave of deception that lie at his feet.