Trump’s Real Legacy Is 450 Miles of Border Wall
Article publisher:
Townhall
Article date:
9 January 2021
Article category:
National News
Medium
Article Body:
The most enduring legacy of the Trump administration will be the construction of 450 miles of new wall at our southern border.
To fully grasp the enormity of this achievement, one must go back to the political landscape of 2016. The Obama White House had spent eight years trying to convince America that it should aspire to be part of a borderless continent. Those trying to enter our country illegally were akin to travelers on the Underground Railroad, seeking freedom and a better life. Who were we to block their entry with a wall? To deny them passage is mean-spirited and evidence of racism in our hearts.
To enforce the sovereignty of the United States at the border was a fool’s errand anyway, the argument went. The U.S.-Mexico border is almost 2,000 miles of harsh desert terrain, and it would be nearly impossible to police it with walls. Furthermore, with a price tag upwards of $20 billion, a wall was an extravagance that the government simply couldn’t afford.
In less than four years, President Trump exposed the fallacy of virtually all of those claims. A borderless nation is no nation at all, but rather an invitation to chaos and societal breakdown....
Since wall construction began after 2016, overwhelming evidence has come in that walls indeed work. Among the flood of supporting data is the fact that in the Yuma sector alone, illegal entries in the area with a new border wall system dropped a staggering 87 percent from 2019 to 2020....
Thanks to the wall shrinking that gap for smugglers to exploit, DHS has over the last four years seized more than 4 million pounds of hard drugs like fentanyl, cocaine, and methamphetamine—almost double the annualized amount of drugs seized between 2009 and 2017....
Make no mistake, building 450 miles of border wall in less than four years is a massive achievement, particularly in light of the tremendous opposition to it...