President Trump has repeatedly claimed that there is a crisis at the border and that to secure the border, we need to build a wall. It’s one of the main reasons that he won in 2016. His critics argue that this is only a manufactured crisis and that there is no crisis along the southern border.
We don’t have to go back far to discover that the idea that there is a crisis along the Southern border isn’t something that Donald Trump just suddenly came up with to rally his base. Even if they didn’t use the term “crisis”, before Donald Trump was elected, many politicians on both sides of the isle have called for increased security along our southern border over the past few decades. President Barack Obama even called for an increase in border security.
We don’t have to go back far to discover that Barack Obama’s Department of Homeland Security Secretary, Jeh Johnson, sent a three page memo to law enforcement chiefs, describing a terroristic threat along our southern border. The subject line of this report read: “ “Cross-Border Movement of Special Interest Aliens”. The report goes on to describe how “immediate attention” is needed to deal with this threat. In 2018 alone, 3,000 “special interest aliens” tried to enter the U.S. illegally. What are “special interest aliens”? Those that are coming from countries with known terrorist activities, who are trying to enter through our southern border. Imagine how many enter that we don’t know about?
Then we have a claim that current Democrat Presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke made in April 2015. Beto wrote on Facebook: “As a member of the House Homeland Security Committee in the 113th Congress, I asked the director of the FBI, the director of the National Counter terrorism Center and the Secretary of Homeland Security if there was currently a terrorist threat on the southern border…They answered that there was not, nor had there every been, any terrorist terrorist plot, or terrorist organization that was able to exploit our border with Mexico.” There’s just a minor problem with this claim. About a month before he posted this, the Texas Department of Public Safety sent a report to every Texas elected official, including O’Rourke since he was a representative at the time, claiming that “Illegal aliens from countries documented by the U.S. Department State as having a known terrorism presence continue to be smuggled into and throughout Texas and the nation on a regular basis, and it is impossible to determine how many of these individuals actually entered the U.S. undetected.”
While a terroristic attack has yet to be carried out due to lack of border security, it’s only a matter of time until someone sneaks something in and tries to carry out a major terrorist attack. I fully agree that both of our borders should be secured by using a variety of means, including border patrol agents, drones and a wall. Ronald Reagan put it perfectly when he said “ “A nation that cannot control its borders is not a nation.”
Despite all of the hype that Conservatives are xenophobes who hate all immigrants, nothing could be further from the truth. I don’t know a single Conservative, personally or in the media, who is advocating that we end all immigration and that immigrants are horrible people. I’m sure these people exist somewhere in the United States, but they are few and far between and they are wrong. We need immigrants. We are a country that is built on immigration. And we welcome immigrants as long as you come here legally and follow the laws of the United States.