Commentary
President Donald Trump declared a national emergency on Feb. 15, in order to continue building a wall on America’s southern border.
“We’re going to confront the national security crisis on our southern border, and we’re going to do it one way or the other,” the president said.
Democrats have tried to frame the issue as simply being about fulfilling a campaign promise, while Trump insists it’s about security for the country.
“The only reason we’re up here talking about this is because of the election, because they want to try and win an election, which it looks like they’re not going to be able to do,” Trump said. “And this is one of the ways where they think they can possibly win—is by obstruction and a lot of other nonsense—and I think that I just want to get it done faster that’s all.”
Two things can be true at the same time.
Sure, Trump’s campaign promise to secure the border was a central theme of his platform—specifically, because walls work. Just ask Israel, where illegal border crossings were cut by 99 percent after its wall went up.
There are real lives affected by criminal (and even non-criminal) elements pouring across our border annually.
It’s estimated that at least 90 percent of the heroin coming into the country isn’t coming through ports of entry. It comes the old fashioned way—people walking it across hundreds of miles of wide open border. Some of the stretches that Democrats say have “fencing” are nothing more than a raggedy barbed wire fence or a simple beam that a 10-year-old could hop.
In addition to drugs, “16,000 children have been trafficked across the southern border; 18,000 women have been sold into sexual slavery,” Anna Paulina, the director of Hispanic Engagement for Turning Point USA said on Twitter in January.
I reached out to her for comment on the president’s announcement.
“The president has refused to ignore the rape, slavery, and murder of thousands of women and children, while the left actively worked at protecting those that exploit them and pushed for an open-border agenda,” she said.
“Today should go down in history as a day that the leader of the free world—our president—chose to take a moral stand against corruption and exploitation, not only in our government, but of the American people and Hispanics in Mexico and South America.”
While the material cost of illegal aliens coming into this country exceeds $115 billion per year, the cost to the lives of millions of Americans who are affected by the crime, gangs, and drugs our open border allows can’t be quantified. We don’t have to look far for painful reminders of the grief and toll taken on families destroyed by illegal aliens.
Just a few days before Trump’s declaration, Angel families protested at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office, demanding action on illegal immigration. One mom mentioned a horrific account and reportedly asked if a rod shoved through the head of a 17-year-old by an illegal alien mattered to her.
It’s difficult to know exactly how many people have been killed by illegal aliens, in part because government agencies, over the years, have been unwilling to release all of the data on this issue. But, there are thousands of people who have had to suffer through the terrible loss—the permanent separation of their loved ones—because they were killed by an illegal alien.
We are sometimes told this is an issue about empathy. So, do we empathize with someone like “Raul Silva-Corona, an illegal immigrant [found] high on meth and with a BAC [blood alcohol content] that was three times the legal limit,” or the family of Sgt. Brandon Mendoza, the Arizona police officer he killed in a head-on collision?
Do we empathize with the estimated 22 million illegal aliens who flagrantly violated our laws, jumped our border, and cut in line in front of legal immigrants going through the process, or do we empathize with the American citizens forking over more than $100 billion a year to pay for them?
Migrants break through the U.S. border fence just beyond the east pedestrian entrance of the San Ysidro crossing in Tijuana, Mexico, on Nov. 25, 2018. Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times
Not a crisis? Not an emergency? I’m old enough to remember that three months ago, in late 2018, there was outrage when a migrant caravan made it to the southern border and was dispersed with tear gas. Real asylum-seekers apply for asylum at ports of entry and in limited circumstances at an embassy. They don’t storm a border and physically assault border patrol agents.
If you don’t see what’s happening at our southern border as a crisis, then you’re either not paying attention or consumed with anti-Trump malaise.
President Trump, please build the wall.
Adrian Norman is a writer and political commentator.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
