DHS: Border Wall Will Cost $21B

M

MI2AZ

Active Member
Building a wall or other barrier along the entire U.S.-Mexico border would cost about $21.6 billion, and take up to three and a half years to complete, according to an internal Department of Homeland Secretary document.

The estimate is almost double the cost cited by President Donald Trump — who made a border wall built at Mexico's expense his signature issue throughout the presidential race — as well as new DHS Secretary John Kelly, who commissioned the report.

The document containing the estimate, first reported by Reuters, lays out a three-phase plan about where construction could begin along the 1,250 miles of border without physical barriers and it details challenges to constructing a wall.

But the report also leaves questions unanswered, namely what the wall will look like.

Kelly toured the Arizona-Mexico border near Nogales on Thursday and met with Gov. Doug Ducey, officials from the federal agencies under DHS and the state's four border sheriffs. One purpose of those meetings was to gauge their opinion of the usefulness of a wall.

"We talked about the value of technology in some areas and physical structures in others, but there's a lot to be vetted out in that," Pima County Sheriff Mark Napier said after the meeting.

Trump has said a border wall would cost anywhere between $10 billion and $12 billion. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told congressional Republicans during a private retreat in Philadelphia that the cost would be closer to $12 billion to $15 billion.

The higher estimate in the DHS report is due in large part to the ballooning costs of acquiring private land, including through eminent domain. Large sections of the border, particularly in Texas, are privately owned.

"People's individual property will be condemned by the federal government for construction of the wall," Denise Gilman told The Arizona Republic. "That’s what happened in the past. And that’s what would have to happen."

She led an effort in 2013 at the University of Texas Law School to document fencing already in place at the Texas-Mexico border. They found barriers erected less than a decade ago had effectively stripped owners of their property, or cut it in two.
 
M

MI2AZ

Active Member
Then you should have loved Obama.

Why Has President Obama Deported More Immigrants Than Any President in US History?

On March 13 2014, President Obama ordered the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to review its deportation practices, acknowledging the toll that record-high deportation rates are taking on local communities. A White House statement issued later that day read, “The president emphasized his deep concern about the pain too many families feel from the separation that comes from our broken immigration system.”

The President’s pledge came in response to growing pressure from immigrant rights advocates and progressive Democrats outraged by the Obama administration’s five-year deportation spree. Since taking the oath of office, Obama has deported immigrants at a faster rate than any other president in US history, nearly a record 2 million people. On a typical day, there are over 30,000 immigrants imprisoned in the world’s largest immigration detention system. Most deportees never see an attorney or have a hearing before a judge before they are expelled from the country. Deportation carries a high price for families and communities across America: one-quarter of all deportees are separated from their US citizen children and countless others from spouses and other family members.

Obama’s claim to sympathize with immigrant families’ “pain” obscures a troubling fact: while the review he ordered may lead to more “humane” treatment of some undocumented immigrants—a welcome if still-modest outcome—it will do nothing for the hundreds of thousands of immigrants who get snared each year in the nation’s thickening national security and criminal enforcement webs. And these immigrants represent the majority of persons deported during the Obama era.

For the last twenty-five years, and particularly since the start of the “War on Terror,” immigration has become increasingly tangled with criminal enforcement and national security. George W. Bush cemented the relationship in 2003 when he folded the Immigration and Naturalization Service into a mammoth new agency, the Department of Homeland Security, which was charged with overseeing both counterterrorism and immigration enforcement. The message was obvious: immigration was a threat to the country, and thus, immigration authorities had become an arm of the national security apparatus. Since then, the government has crafted a range of policies and programs targeting the “criminal aliens” in our midst, boosting funding for these programs from $23 million a year to $690 million a year between 2004 and 2011. No group has been exempt, but Latino, Afro-Caribbean and Muslim immigrants have suffered some of the most stringent enforcement, reflecting the racial profiling to which these populations are subject in the criminal justice, immigration and national security systems.

Little of this has changed under Obama and much of it has gotten worse, thanks to his administration’s embrace of what they call a “smart enforcement” approach. Under this approach, the administration aggressively deports immigrants targeted as criminals or terrorists—even when it is clear that they do not pose any danger. In 2012, Obama told the Spanish-language television network Univision that, “We try to focus our enforcement on people who generally pose a threat to our communities, not to hardworking families who are minding their own business and oftentimes have members of their family who are US citizens.”

As proof that it is weeding out the “bad guys,” Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) recently reported that 59 percent of deportations in fiscal year 2013 involved noncitizens with criminal records. Yet, what ICE did not highlight is that the vast majority of criminal deportees were expelled for non-violent offenses, with 60 percent convicted of misdemeanors punishable by less than one year in prison. In 2012, less than one percent of such deportations involved homicide convictions. And according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University, in the decade since 9/11, the government has deported thirty-seven people on terrorism grounds—a figure surprisingly low given the law’s expansive definition of terrorism. Clearly, immigrants are not the serious threat the government paints them to be.

“Smart enforcement” strategies have led to an unprecedented level of cooperation between ICE, the FBI and local police agencies as they seek to target “terrorists” and “criminal aliens.” Not surprisingly, the proportion of criminal to non-criminal deportations has grown steadily ever the past decade. Yet, we have seen national declines in crime rates over the same period, and studies have shown that immigrants are much less likely than US citizens to commit crimes. Immigrants are not becoming more unlawful or dangerous; the government is just more aggressive in labeling them as such.

In the case of Muslim immigrants, the immigration system routinely casts them as would-be terrorists, monitoring and scrutinizing them accordingly. The FBI and federal immigration agencies have teamed up to closely screen immigrant applicants from Muslim countries, and indiscriminately spy on those living in the United States. Lacking evidence to convict terror suspects for actual crimes, the government has deported thousands of Muslim immigrants on minor immigration violations and used threats of deportation to coerce Muslims to inform on their mosques and communities. While DHS does not release public data on the number of Muslim immigrants it deports, our review of country-specific deportation figures from 2003 to 2012 shows that more than 60,000 citizens of Muslim nations in the Middle East, Africa and Asia were officially expelled from the United States in this period.
 
Last edited:
Greg T.

Greg T.

The Jizz Slinger
I won't even attempt to read past the title. BUT, let's say this is true, just for shits and giggles. It means absolutely nothing to say Bam Bam deported more illegals than any other president when HE is the one with the LEAST amount of border protection, has probably sent the same people back 50 times, and allowed the illegal number to climb to an estimated 30 million. That's no different than saying he created 200 million jobs....when nobody reports the 500 million he allowed to move across the pond.
 
B

Brickguy221 (R.I.P.)

Member
Greg T. said:
I won't even attempt to read past the title. BUT, let's say this is true, just for shits and giggles. It means absolutely nothing to say Bam Bam deported more illegals than any other president when HE is the one with the LEAST amount of border protection, has probably sent the same people back 50 times, and allowed the illegal number to climb to an estimated 30 million. That's no different than saying he created 200 million jobs....when nobody reports the 500 million he allowed to move across the pond.
Click to expand...
+1 ... my thoughts also.... :Thumbsup:
 
W

WAMO

Spanking His Monkey
ISNT THAT COUNTER CONTRADICTIVE? BEING PRAISED FOR DEPORTING THE MOST, THEN ASKING DHS TO REVIEW THEIR POLICY BECAUSE IT HURTS THE IMMIGRANTS? THAT ARE HERE ILLEGALLY! GLAD HE IS GONE.
 
M

MI2AZ

Active Member
Greg T. said:
I won't even attempt to read past the title. BUT, let's say this is true, just for shits and giggles. It means absolutely nothing to say Bam Bam deported more illegals than any other president when HE is the one with the LEAST amount of border protection, has probably sent the same people back 50 times, and allowed the illegal number to climb to an estimated 30 million. That's no different than saying he created 200 million jobs....when nobody reports the 500 million he allowed to move across the pond.
Click to expand...

The least amount of border protection? I was not aware that he was the only president we have had since we had borders. Did he remove all the walls the other presidents had installed? Why do you only place blame on him?
 
Greg T.

Greg T.

The Jizz Slinger
MI2AZ said:
The least amount of border protection? I was not aware that he was the only president we have had since we had borders. Did he remove all the walls the other presidents had installed? Why do you only place blame on him?
Click to expand...
He cut the number of border patrols substantially and armed the fucking mexican drug cartel, which btw, used those guns to kill more border patrols.
 
M

MI2AZ

Active Member
Border agent numbers don't mean much. I live very close to the Mexican border. A friend saw some illegals walking around a Border Patrol checkpoint and stopped to tell the agents. They said they don't care about them, their job is to check the cars of Americans to make sure that they are not transporting illegals. ???? WTF. So the more agents we have around here means the more we get hassled. When we want to go to Tucson, which is the nearest large city, we have to stop at a Border Patrol checkpoint that is about 20 miles north of the border. You can't get to Tucson without being stopped at one of them. One of the questions they used to ask was why are you going there and how long are you going to be there? Why should an American citizen have to answer that?

Another friend saw some illegals and stopped a Border Patrol vehicle to tell them. The guy said he was too fat to chase down Mexicans. ??? So more agents like that are going to do what? Sit in their vehicles eating donuts?
 
M

MI2AZ

Active Member
And Greg, you are wrong about the numbers, not substantial. Found this:


The number of agents stationed at the U.S.-Mexico border nearly doubled under President Bush, growing from 9,147 agents at the southwest border in fiscal year 2001 to 17,408 in FY 2009, under funding levels established by Bush.

Under Obama, that number continued to increase, hitting a peak of 18,611 in FY 2013. The number declined to 17,522 in the last fiscal year, about 1 percent above the number Obama inherited.
 
M

MI2AZ

Active Member
Also found this:


Wasserman Schultz said, "President Obama has the most border patrols and border security deployed at the border of any previous president."

She is correct that the highest number of border patrol agents has been under Obama: there were 21,444 in 2011. Wasserman Schultz was careful here and said "most" and didn’t talk about the growth rate. But it’s worth noting that the big growth was during Bush’s tenure: between 2001 and 2009, the number of agents posted nationally rose from about 9,800 to a little more than 20,000.

Other border security measures are not as simple to quantify. The key piece of infrastructure -- the fence -- was launched under Bush. Work on the fence and other border security improvements continued under Obama.

We rate this claim Mostly True.
 
M

MI2AZ

Active Member
Border Crossings — Under Obama, the number of unauthorized immigrants caught trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border — a key indicator of the flow of illegal immigration — has plunged dramatically. And it has done so while the number of agents stationed at the border has gone up.

Apprehensions at the U.S.-Mexico border fell to 331,333 last fiscal year, a reduction of 53 percent compared with the 705,005 unauthorized immigrants apprehended at the southwest border in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, 2008, less than four months before Obama first took office

Unauthorized Immigrant Population — Meanwhile, as we reported in our previous update, the number of people living in the U.S. illegally has declined, according to independent estimates by demographers.

The Pew Research Center estimated the number at 11.7 million in 2008, and most recently at 11.3 million in 2014, a decline of roughly 400,000, or 3.4 percent.

And the Center for Migration Studies estimated that the drop has been even more pronounced, going from 12 million in 2008 to 10.9 million in 2014. That would be a decrease of 1.1 million, or 9 percent. (See Figure 1, page 3.)

Such estimates are inexact; those breaking the law by being here can’t be expected to confess that to Census officials. But demographers have applied consistent methodologies from year to year, and agree that the trend has been downward.
 
Greg T.

Greg T.

The Jizz Slinger
Okay, let's run with that and say it's true. WTF good are the agents when they are ordered not to shoot, and only use a catch and release? May as well not have any.
 
Greg T.

Greg T.

The Jizz Slinger
MI2AZ said:
Border Crossings — Under Obama, the number of unauthorized immigrants caught trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border — a key indicator of the flow of illegal immigration — has plunged dramatically. And it has done so while the number of agents stationed at the border has gone up.

Apprehensions at the U.S.-Mexico border fell to 331,333 last fiscal year, a reduction of 53 percent compared with the 705,005 unauthorized immigrants apprehended at the southwest border in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, 2008, less than four months before Obama first took office

Unauthorized Immigrant Population — Meanwhile, as we reported in our previous update, the number of people living in the U.S. illegally has declined, according to independent estimates by demographers.

The Pew Research Center estimated the number at 11.7 million in 2008, and most recently at 11.3 million in 2014, a decline of roughly 400,000, or 3.4 percent.

And the Center for Migration Studies estimated that the drop has been even more pronounced, going from 12 million in 2008 to 10.9 million in 2014. That would be a decrease of 1.1 million, or 9 percent. (See Figure 1, page 3.)

Such estimates are inexact; those breaking the law by being here can’t be expected to confess that to Census officials. But demographers have applied consistent methodologies from year to year, and agree that the trend has been downward.
Click to expand...
If that's true, do you know WHY the numbers crossing have plunged?? There isn't any mexicans left in mexico! BUT, seriously, the numbers went from an estimated 11 to 13 million in 08 to over 30 million today.
 
Greg T.

Greg T.

The Jizz Slinger
I remember reading them a short while ago. Can't remember where. I'll dig them up when I get a chance.
 
W

WAMO

Spanking His Monkey
PROBABLY THE SAME REPORTING COMPANY THAT SAID UNEPLOYMENT WAS DOWN. ALL NUMBERS MADE TO MAKE THE DEMS LOOK GOOD FOR ELECTION TIME. IT DIDNT WORK.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top