Is a wall needed? These security measures already are in place at U.S.-Mexico border
TUCSON — As President Donald Trump considers declaring a national emergency along the U.S.-Mexico border to build additional infrastructure along the U.S.-Mexico border, analysts and his administration's own findings have concluded that their assessments of security threats along the border are at odds with Trump's assertion of a "crisis."
Time and time again, Trump has referred to the border as "lawless," and in a letter to Congress last week he even said that the "Southern Border is a very dangerous place."
But with numerous investments in staffing, infrastructure and technology over the years, the situation at the border is vastly different than in the past two decades, when the number of yearly apprehensions began to decline from the 1 million mark.
2018's apprehensions count along the U.S.-Mexico border, 396,579, is among the lowest totals in nearly five decades.
The Department of Homeland Security's Office of Immigration Statistics published a report in September 2017, well into Trump's first year in office, in which it detailed how enforcement outputs like deterrence, and outcomes like the apprehension of unauthorized immigrants had changed greatly.
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The report concluded that "available data indicate that the southwest land border is more difficult to illegally cross today than ever before," it said, Meanwhile, "available data also indicate the lowest number of illegal entries at least since 2000, and likely since the early 1970s," the report added.
Some key facts about security measures in place at the U.S.-Mexico border:
654 miles of the border have fencing
In 2006, Congress passed the Secure Fence Act which called for building fencing along 700 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border, and increasing the use of technology such as fixed towers and drones to help patrol the border.
To date, there are nearly 705 miles of barriers built along the border, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reports. But 51 of those miles are secondary or tertiary fencing, which means they were built to reinforce existing primary fencing.
Of the 654 miles of the border that have fencing, 374 miles employ pedestrian fencing using either landing mats, steel bollards or wire mesh. These designs were built almost exclusively along urbanized areas of the U.S.-Mexico border.
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The remaining 280 miles with fencing have vehicle barriers, which use railroad tracks or slats designed to keep out cars, but not people.
Most of the California, Arizona and New Mexico borders with Mexico have some type of barriers in place. However, only about a tenth of Texas' border with Mexico has fencing.
In November, Customs and Border Protection finished replacing 20 miles of shorter vehicle fencing with 18-to-30-foot-tall steel bollards in Santa Teresa, New Mexico, just west of El Paso.
The border agency said work crews will break ground in February on the construction of 14 new miles of levee walls in Texas' Rio Grande Valley.
Staffing on the border has increased
In the past few years, both Border Patrol and the Office of Field Operations, which handles ports-of-entry staffing, have struggled to fill the number of vacancies that it's funded for.
To date, Border Patrol is approximately 7,500 agents below its target, even as Trump has pushed to hire more.
But despite the shortage, the overall number of agents patrolling the border is up considerably compared with years past, when the number of apprehensions was greater than it is now.
According to the latest statistics from 2017, Border Patrol employed nearly 19,500 agents to patrol the nation's borders. Almost all of them, 16,600 agents, were at the Southwest border.
By comparison, in 2007, there were roughly 13,300 agents patrolling the U.S.-Mexico border. And that year, they detained 876,704 migrants, twice the number of apprehensions from 2018.
Humanitarian, not security, emergency
Adam Isaacson, a border expert for the Washington Office for Latin America, a nonpartisan Washington, D.C.,-based human rights group, said that given the current state of security at the border there is not security emergency, but rather "a growing humanitarian crisis."
He pointed to the change in the makeup of migrants that are increasingly arriving at the border. In 2018, nearly 40 percent of all apprehensions were families or unaccompanied minors, that's the greatest share since the government began tracking those data in 2013.
"Most of these children and families are seeking out U.S. border authorities, not trying to evade them," Isaacson argued.
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"They are entering an asylum system that is now so overburdened that they are routinely assigned hearing dates in 2022 or 2023," he added.
Isaacson argued Tuesday that many security factors along the U.S.-Mexico, have improved or would be unaffected by additional border infrastructure.
"This is a humanitarian crisis. It may go on for a while," he said. "The profile of migration has changed. It is a 'new normal.' And walls won't stop it."
