OPINION | This article contains commentary that reflects the author's opinion.
According to CNSNews.com, the Department of Homeland Security will be able to construct “400, 450 miles” of border wall, including auxillary security equipment and roads by the end of 2020.
President Trump spoke before the announcements were made by acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf at a press conference earlier this week. The president assured Americans that “very few” people were coming into the country illegally.
He added that the border wall was supplemented by 27,000 Mexican soldiers protecting the Mexican side, making the environment “a very tough place to come into”.
Wolf began his announcement by declaring that they need to be building the wall on a daily basis in order to meet their own expectations for progress.
CNSNew.com covered Wolf’s announcement.
We’re up to over 150, I believe. We’re continuing to build new–new miles of wall. And a lot of folks ask about replacement wall or new miles? It’s a new capability on the Southwest border that we haven’t had before.
And so, whether you talk to the agents, the Border Patrol agents, they like that capability…They like that impedance and denial that it provides them. And it provides the ability for those agents to focus elsewhere on parts of the border that are very difficult to patrol so we can use our resources in a different way. And so, we see a lot of benefits from the border wall system.
And again, that includes not only the physical infrastructure but the cameras, the roads, the lightings, the fiber optic cables, and we’re looking forward and we’re still well on our track–well on our mark to meet 400, 450 miles by the end of the calendar year.
President Trump spoke proudly about the “exactly” 161 miles of wall that have so effectively constructed that, “other than walking around it on the edges, it’s stopping everybody cold,”.
Since the wall became President Trump’s mission five years ago, he claims that the Democrats, although they knew the wall would work, changed their public views in spite of him.
President Trump continued his praise of the work being done at the border wall.
“It’s having a tremendous impact but we are now focused on so many different things because of what has happened, because of this horrible–I say it’s a horrible phenomenon that now we have got to focus on drugs and the drugs come in from different methods, and we have the best people at sea anywhere in the world, so we will have a tremendous impact on drugs. But one of the other things we will also have an impact, we think, on the coronavirus.”
President Trump also announced deploying an enhanced counter-narcotics operations team to fight the cartels in order to rid the world of the “deadly scourge of illegal narcotics”.
