Mexico pay for it?
Over the past three years, construction crews here have installed 90 miles of border wall and almost 40 miles more of a parallel, back-up wall in the Yuma border patrol region, which spans from the Imperial Dunes in southeastern California to Arizona’s Pima County line. Compared to what I saw on a visit one year ago, the places on the border that Border Patrol agents show me today are unrecognizable.
he border has physically changed as a result of the Trump administration’s decision to fund projects along the 2,000-mile dividing line between two countries.
But it is also different in the way federal agents who are responsible for securing this strip of land-use infrastructure such as a wall to carry out their national security mission.
There’s always been some sort of wall
The Yuma region has had some sort of physical barrier along its border with Mexico for more than 30 years, Border Patrol’s head of the Yuma region Anthony Porvaznik tells me as we sit in his office living room. Three replica plaques that commemorate the 100-, 200-, and 300-mile ceremonies for completed miles of wall nationwide sit on the coffee table between us. The ceremonies have all been held here in Yuma, and it makes sense, given that one-third of the 370 miles of completed wall has been here in Porvaznik’s backyard.
Yuma sector was the beneficiary of a lot of infrastructure back in the ’06 timeframe,” Porvaznik says, in reference to the Secure Fence Act 2006 that became law during the George W. Bush administration. That funding came through after a brutal year for agents up and down the southwest border, when more than 1.5 million illegal immigrants were arrested — far more than the 1.1 million arrests at the southern border during last year’s humanitarian crisis. The Yuma region accounted for 139,000 arrests in 2005.
“Two thousand, nine hundred drive-through vehicles came through Yuma sector alone in one year,” says Porvaznik. “We caught maybe one out of 10 of those, if that. So we have no idea what got away at that point because there was no fence.”
he back and forth between smugglers and Border Patrol continued after Porvaznik took over the region in 2015. Arrests of illegal immigrants doubled. During last year’s border crisis, up to 60% of his agents were so overwhelmed with illegal immigrant arrests, half of whom were families, that taking care of detainees took up more time than their normal law enforcement duties. The “hodgepodge” of existing barriers was not cutting it.
The new wall is comprised of six-inch square posts filled with concrete. A gap of four inches was left between each post to allow agents to see through the fence when looking straight at it. The only downside to agents is that a five-mile stretch of the border will not get new wall because the land belongs to the Cocopah Reservation. This area is where agents are seeing the most illegal immigration right now, an indication of the new wall’s success at preventing illegal entries.
Agents suspect that when the coronavirus pandemic passes and they are no longer able to immediately return illegal immigrants south of the border, as they have been able to, more will attempt to sneak into the U.S. With so many miles of new wall in place, Porvaznik thinks his agents now actually stand a chance at holding the line.
“We're much better positioned right now to deal with that traffic when they do come than we have been in the past,” he said.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/n...etting-results
Mexico pay for it?
rofl.. idiots..
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