Trump’s Wall Is Working

Trump’s wall is a reality. It exists, it works. But you can’t see it. It’s a wall of words, furious rhetoric against immigrants, the likes of which the United States hasn’t heard for decades. The new American administration arrived with a clear message: We don’t want you to come. We will detain you, you will not have any opportunities. And those of you that are here, we want you to leave. We will make life impossible until you leave. If anyone has taken Donald Trump seriously, it has been the immigrants. For his administration, it’s a success. For the countries of origin and the cities where immigrants live, it’s a preoccupation. For the families at risk of being separated, it’s a tragedy.

On March 11, during a conference on border security in San Antonio, Texas, U.S. Customs and Border Protection Chief Acquisition Officer Mark Borkowski displayed a revealing slide. Borkowski was describing how over the last decades, there have been investments in technology, defensive walls and police deployment in California, Arizona and Texas, and in general, the arrival of illegal immigrants has fluctuated. Until November 2016. “I wonder what happened in November,” Borkowski said, as the audience, made up of security professionals, chuckled.*

In November, 66,363 people were detained trying to cross the border illegally. In December, the number was 58,431. But there was a further reduction from December to January, in February and in March. “Throughout the history of border patrol statistics, since the 1950s, it’s the first time that we have seen this happen,” Borkowski said. The number of detentions between January and March has never decreased. “I wonder what happened in January…” Borkowski again joked.*

The number of detentions is not the only indicator of whether fewer people are arriving illegally into the United States. But if you had to focus on one factor, it is the most significant. Moreover, Borkowski explained, there are other details that professionals can observe, for example, such as whether a place which usually shows footprints from walkers suddenly has none.

For security professionals, it’s evident that Trump’s victory, by itself, has made the border more secure. The wall of contempt is working. The executive orders on Jan. 25 mandated that construction on the wall begin, and ordered the hiring of thousands of agents to detain immigrants with collaboration from local police, impeding any illegal entry. Of all this, only the last has been achieved.

Ronald Vitiello, chief of the U.S. Border Patrol, said at the same conference that the policy of detaining and releasing according to the risk posed by the individual “encourages coming.” The new order is that no one will leave detention until they are tried and deported. Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced an unprecedented mobilization of prosecutors and judges to speed up the process near Nogales. The numbers indicate that these developments have been enough for Trump to chalk them up as a historic reduction in immigration and a victory during his first 100 days.

The other side to these executive orders is the deportation of approximately 11 million undocumented migrants who live in the United States, an unmanageable number after 30 years with the road to citizenship blocked. The figures indicate that Trump and Sessions have not deported more people than Barack Obama did during his harshest year. But they have deported more ordinary people who were not in trouble with the law, and until now, thought that by avoiding the police, they could live peacefully.

Border police do not have the capacity for massive deportations — hence the controversy with sanctuary cities, which have refused to help with this task. But a few isolated cases have been enough to give the impression that no one is safe: a mother of three U.S. citizens in Arizona, another mother in Ohio, three Dreamers** who in principle were legally protected, a man who had just taken his daughter to school. The unthinkable is real, the fear is real, to the point that Los Angeles police say that fewer crimes are being reported because there is a whole population which has become scared of giving personal information to any authority.

Recently, a high-ranking Mexican public official confessed his fear that all of Trump and Sessions’ propaganda campaign, practically impossible to implement, in reality had only one objective: the self-deportation of people. By getting people to decide that living like this isn’t worthwhile, thousands have arrived at the conclusion that travel to the United States is not worth the risk. The wall of fear is now working.

*Editor’s note: Although accurately translated, these quoted remarks could not be independently verified.

**Editor’s note: “Dreamers” refers to persons who would have been protected under the DREAM Act, (an acronym for Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors), federal legislation which proposed creating a pathway to citizenship for undocumented children who grew up in the United States. Many states have passed their own immigration legislation also named DREAM Acts.