Adam Isacson

Defense, security, borders, migration, and human rights in Latin America and the United States. May not reflect my employer’s consensus view.

Fencing

October 5, 2023 — 0

The Administration’s Border Wall Messaging Will Make Your Head Hurt

This is a single screenshot from today’s New York Times article about the Biden administration’s announcement that it is building new segments of border wall. The highlighted bits are a few paragraphs apart.

<highlight>“There is presently an acute and immediate need to construct physical barriers and roads in the vicinity of the border of the United States in order to prevent unlawful entries into the United States,”</highlight> said Mr. Mayorkas in the notice. It added that construction would be built with funds appropriated by Congress in 2019 for wall construction in the Rio Grande Valley. That appropriation followed a disaster declaration by the Trump administration amid soaring numbers of border crossers. Mr. Biden said on Thursday that he had no choice but to use the money for the wall. “The money was appropriated for the border wall. I tried to get them to reappropriate, to redirect that money. They didn’t. They wouldn’t,” he told reporters, apparently referring to Congress. <highlight>Asked whether he thought the border wall was effective, he replied, “no.”</highlight>

It’s unusual to see that much self-contradiction in such close proximity.

If you listen to President Biden today, it sounds like his administration has been forced, against its will, to waive 26 environmental and cultural laws to build abut 20 miles of border wall in Starr County, in south Texas.

But if you listen to the Department of Homeland Security language in the Federal Register, it looks like they’re doing this out of a newfound enthusiasm for border walls.

Biden is correct: the wall-building money comes from 2019 appropriations, passed for then-president Donald Trump by a Republican congressional majority, which the Biden administration and congressional Democrats were unable to rescind. The Impoundment Control Act says that presidents have to spend money as Congress appropriates it, before it expires.

The money in question is in the blue section of this chart, in the 2019 column. (The chart comes from a January 2020 commentary I wrote for WOLA.) By the time Trump left office, the 2017 money was spent, the 2018 money was all but spent, but most of the 2019 money was not, and the 2020 money hadn’t been touched yet. (See this October 2020 “Border Wall Status” report that I saved.)

A 2020 chart breaking down sources of border wall money. The "blue part," denoting congressional appropriations, is $441 million in 2017 and $1.375 billion in each of 2018, 2019, and 2020.

So President Biden is right: he had no choice but to spend the border wall money before it expired, presumably with the September 30 end of the government’s 2023 fiscal year. But his administration has done a poor job of explaining that today.

Update October 7: After a lot of conversations about this on October 5 and 6, and I feel I should soften the “Biden is right” language above, because it’s more complicated.

While it’s true that Biden had to use the 2019 appropriations money, it’s unclear whether the Impoundments Act required him to waive 26 laws to proceed with the wall construction.

This is a question that federal courts would probably have to resolve. As seen in recent cases, the decision would likely be made following a lawsuit—possibly filed in the federal judiciary’s conservative Fifth Circuit by Republican state governments. It’s probable that the case would escalate to the Supreme Court. It’s understandable that the Biden administration would prefer not to engage its Justice Department in this litigation, considering it could drag on for a couple of years and potentially result in an unfavorable precedent.

However, the question remains: why didn’t the administration devise a barrier design that met congressional requirements without needing to waive environmental and other laws? Such a design would have been more likely to withstand legal scrutiny, and would have earned less criticism from environmental advocates and the President’s supporters.

One possible explanation is internal bureaucratic politics. The wall designs for Starr County were initially conceived during the Trump administration. It’s plausible that career officials from the Department of Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection (among them, one suspects, the drafters of that “acute and immediate need” language) were resistant to revisiting the designs. It seems that the Biden administration’s political appointees were not prepared to push back strongly on this issue. So here we are.

September 10, 2023 — 0

U.S.-Mexico Border Barriers Now Total 741 Miles

A U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report released on September 7, covering harms done by Trump-era U.S.-Mexico border wall construction, includes the only number I’ve seen of the total amount of barriers currently built along the border.

A bit oddly, the report doesn’t exactly say how many miles are fenced off. But GAO reported that number in 2017, and last week’s report explains how many new and replacement miles got built during the Trump years. It’s easy to add them together.

20172023Difference% Difference
Pedestrian Barrier354636282+80%
Vehicle Barrier300105-195-65%
Total Border Fencing65474187+13%

Taking those sources together reveals that 741 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border is now fenced off.

Of that amount, 636 miles are fenced off with what usually gets called “border wall”: “pedestrian fencing,” or segments of barrier that are high enough, with slats close together enough, to block someone crossing on foot (and unwilling to climb). The other 105 miles are “vehicle fencing”: usually, barrier that is low or widely spaced enough to walk through or over, but not to drive through or over.

The Trump administration built 87 miles of border wall in spaces that had no barrier before. That doesn’t sound like much: a 13 percent increase over where things stood at the end of the Obama administration. But Trump’s people replaced 195 miles of vehicle fencing with pedestrian fencing, for a total of 282 miles of new pedestrian barrier: an 80 percent increase. And they made a lot of old pedestrian barrier taller, or double-layer.

The entire U.S.-Mexico border is about 1,950 miles long (it’s hard to measure exactly over all of the Rio Grande’s twists and turns). So today, about 38 percent of the U.S.-Mexico border is fenced off, 33 percent of it with pedestrian fencing. The Trump administration added new fencing over 4 percent of the border that was previously unfenced, and new pedestrian fencing over 14 percent of the border.

Most of Texas, which follows the Rio Grande and is largely privately owned land, is not fenced.

Here’s where I derive the numbers in the table above:

From report GAO-17-331, Southwest Border Security: Additional Actions Needed to Better Assess Fencing’s Contributions to Operations and Provide Guidance for Identifying Capability Gaps, published February 16, 2017:

From report GAO-23-105443, Southwest Border: Additional Actions Needed to Address Cultural and Natural Resource Impacts from Barrier Construction, published September 7, 2023:

September 6, 2023 — 0

Bye Bye Buoys

The Justice Department won its lawsuit against Texas Gov. Greg Abbott over the ridiculous border buoys in the Rio Grande.

The court just ordered the “buoy wall” taken down by September 15.

Screenshot from linked court order: Defendants shall, by September 15, 2023, reposition, at Defendants’ expense, and in coordination with the United States Army Corps of Engineers, all buoys, anchors, and other related materials composing the floating barrier placed by Texas in the Rio Grande in the vicinity of Eagle Pass, Texas to the bank of the Rio Grande on the Texas side of the river.
May 9, 2022 — 0

Photo

Seagulls atop the border wall in Tijuana last Thursday.

February 11, 2021 — 0

From ‘Pause’ to ‘Reverse’: What Lies Ahead for Stopping Trump’s Border Wall and Fixing the Damage

We’re 3 weeks into the Biden administration. What’s happening with Trump’s border wall? How much got built? How much did it cost? How much is left unspent? How can we go about taking this down, or at least taking the most harmful parts down?

Here’s a new analysis at wola.org that shares answers to all these questions, to the best of my current knowledge based on a lot of document-digging and coalition work. Not to mention the diligent editing, presentation improvements, and communications support from the great team at WOLA.

Here’s a brief excerpt of the boring, numbers-filled part, plus a great infographic that our communications team designed. But do read the whole thing at WOLA’s website.

What got built, and what funds remain

The Trump administration managed to build 455 miles of wall along the border before January 20, leaving 703 of the U.S.-Mexico border’s 1,970 miles fenced off in some way. From past U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) updates we estimate that, of those 455 miles:

  • 49 miles were built where no fencing existed before;
  • 158 replaced existing, shorter pedestrian fencing;
  • 193 replaced existing vehicle barrier; and
  • 55 miles are new or replacement secondary fencing.

In all, then, the Trump administration built about 242 miles of fencing in places where it had previously been possible to walk across the border. The vast majority of the 455 miles are in Arizona and New Mexico.

The full amount of funding devoted to construction has totaled $16.45 billion between fiscal years 2017 and 2021. It was to build about 794 miles of wall. (That would be $20.7 million per mile.) Congress specifically approved only about one third of that amount ($5.8 billion). Trump wrested the remaining two-thirds from the budgets of the Defense and Treasury Departments.

Of that $16.45 billion, the amount that remains unspent—or that could be clawed back by canceling construction contracts—remains unclear. It’s one of the main things the new administration is trying to find out.

In-depth: Where the money for the wall came from

Category #1

  • $3.6 billion were taken in February 2019 from the Defense Department’s military construction funds. This was to build about 175 miles of border wall, of which about 87 had been completed as of January 8.
  • In late 2018 and early 2019, Donald Trump allowed parts of the federal government to shut down for 35 days rather than sign a 2019 budget bill that didn’t meet his demand for $5.7 billion in border wall funding. Trump finally gave in, but shortly afterward—on February 15, 2019—he declared a “national emergency” that, he alleged, gave him the authority to transfer money from the Defense budget to build border barriers.
  • The Pentagon saw $3.6 billion of its military construction plans cancelled or delayed as funds were transferred to the Homeland Security Department to build fencing.
  • Though both houses of Congress twice voted to disapprove this “emergency,” they could not muster the two-thirds vote necessary to override Trump’s vetoes of their disapprovals.
  • A challenge to this emergency continues to work its way through the courts, but the Supreme Court allowed building to continue while this happens.
  • Because these funds were not appropriated by Congress, President Biden is not required to keep spending this money—and his January 20 proclamation, notified to Congress on February 10, rescinds Trump’s emergency declaration.

Category #2

  • $6.331 billion ($2.5 billion in 2019 and $3.831 billion in 2020) were transferred from elsewhere in the Defense Department budget into the Department’s counter-drug account. To do so, Trump used a recurring authority in the Defense Appropriations law (Section 8005), which allows the president to move up to $4 billion each year between Defense budget accounts to respond to “unforeseen” requirements. This maneuver was to provide funds to build about 291 miles of border wall, of which about 256 had been completed as of January 8.
  • The Defense budget can be used to build walls, as long as the Department can claim there’s a counter-drug reason for doing so. Section 284(b)(7) of Title 10, U.S. Code, a piece of drug-war legislation that first passed a Democratic-majority Congress in 1990, allows the Defense Department to use its budget for “construction of roads and fences and installation of lighting to block drug smuggling corridors across international boundaries of the United States.”
  • The Trump administration filled up the Defense counter-drug account with wall-building money by transferring it, in 2019 (here and here) and 2020, from many other defense priorities, ranging from equipment to aircraft procurement and much else.
  • A challenge to this “unforeseen” transfer continues to work its way through the courts, but the Supreme Court allowed building to continue while this happens.
  • Because these funds were not appropriated by Congress, President Biden is not required to keep spending this money.

Category #3

  • $601 million were taken in 2019 from the Treasury Department’s Asset Forfeiture Fund, the proceeds from assets seized from accused criminals or terrorists. It’s not clear how many miles of wall this has built or may build, as CBP’s reporting lumps this money together with congressionally appropriated money for 2019 discussed in the fourth category.

Category #4

  • Congress appropriated $5.841 billion in the Homeland Security components of the federal budgets for 2017 ($341 million) and 2018-2021 ($1.375 billion each). These appropriated funds, plus the Treasury funds in category three, were to pay for about 328 miles of wall (extrapolating from CBP’s most recent update and a January 20 Washington Post estimate), of which 110 miles have been built.
  • Nearly all of what remains unbuilt from this category is in Texas, where most land abutting the border is privately owned.
  • Because these funds were appropriated by Congress to build a “barrier system” at the border, the Biden administration needs to figure out how to avoid spending them on Trump’s border wall. These provisions, the Washington Post reported, “would potentially oblige the Biden administration to complete up to 227 additional miles of border wall.”

The four categories of border wall funding all add up to $16.373 billion (about $77 million short of the amount that a Senate staffer cited to the Associated Press on January 22). It would pay for 794 miles of wall, of which 455 were built.

Read the whole report here.

December 8, 2020 — 0

Government reports relevant to Latin America obtained in November

  • Southwest Border: Information on Federal Agencies’ Process for Acquiring Private Land for Barriers (Washington: U.S. Government Accountability Office, November 17, 2020).
    An update on the status of 5,275 acres of eminent domain claims, for which the federal government seeks to seize land from private property owners to build the Trump administration’s border wall.
  • Rule of Law Assistance: State and USAID Could Improve Monitoring Efforts (Washington: U.S. Government Accountability Office, November 9, 2020).
    A look at how the State Department’s Narcotics Bureau and USAID monior the effectiveness of rule of law programs, with Colombia one of the countries most scrutinized.
  • Guyana – Bell 412EPi and 429 Helicopters (Washington: Defense Security Cooperation Agency, October 30, 2020).
    The President must notify Congress of any pending Foreign Military Sale of defense articles or services exceeding $50 million, of design and construction services exceeding $200 million, or any major defense equipment exceeding $14 million.
  • June S. Beittel, Colombia: Background and U.S. Relations (Washington: Congressional Research Service, October 26, 2020).
    A detailed overview of past and current U.S. assistance to Colombia, as well as Colombia’s current political outlook.
October 29, 2020 — 0

400 Miles of Harm: There is Nothing to Celebrate about Border Wall Construction

I was aware that DHS was getting close to completing 400 miles of Trump’s border wall, and was racing to complete that much before the election. So I’d anticipated that there’d be some huge obnoxious campaign event that we’d have to respond to.

When I got wind on Tuesday that a 400-mile commemoration ceremony was planned for today, that seemed to be it. I made the cursor move left-to-right as fast as I could and cranked out these 1,800 words on how much of the wall is actually “new,” what it’s costing us, and how it has harmed the environment, indigenous communities, property rights, foreign relations, checks and balances, and corruption protections.

And then… a nothingburger. This morning, DHS’s “Acting Chad” Wolf and Senior Official Performing the Duties of the Commissioner of CBP Mark Morgan held a lonely event with a few assembled reporters, in the shadow of the wall on an unseasonably cold day in south Texas. It might pick up some minor media attention, but it served more to highlight how little Donald Trump is bothering to talk about the border and migration during his increasingly bizarre re-election campaign.

My “rapid response” may have been a bit too amped up here. But I’m glad I produced this piece, which is a good “cheat sheet” for all that is wrong with Trump’s border wall.

April 6, 2020 — 0

At wola.org: The Trump Administration’s COVID-19 Response at the Border Puts Us All At Risk

So, imagine that Donald Trump were to win re-election in November, and also win supermajorities in the House and Senate. What would U.S. border and migration policy look like?

It would look pretty much like it does today. The White House has seized on the COVID-19 emergency to ram through most of its border-security and immigration agenda by fiat. And it’s doing it in ways that threaten to spread the virus: at home, in Mexican border towns, and in Central America.

Read all about it at WOLA’s website, where a new commentary by me went up today. In a nutshell, the following are all happening, all at once:

  • Border wall construction is still proceeding
  • The Pentagon is sending more troops
  • The end of the right to asylum
  • Turning back unaccompanied children
  • Deportations haven’t stopped
  • Repatriation agreements suspended
  • “Remain in Mexico” hearings delayed
  • Crowded detention centers
  • Mexico’s migration crackdown continues

This is all happening at once. We need to stare it in the face, so we can then make a hell of a lot of noise about it.

February 14, 2020 — 0

Border walls, military aid, and more: the Defense Department’s all-purpose counter-drug budget

The Trump administration will be taking $7.2 billion out of the Defense Department’s budget this year to pay for building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. (Very little of that money will get spent if he loses in November.) He’s been able to move some of that money into his wall—even though Congress never approved it—by declaring a “national emergency” and outlasting congressional efforts to disapprove that emergency (they need a two-thirds majority and only muster a simple majority).

Much of the Defense fund transfers, though, don’t even require an emergency declaration. The money can be moved under existing law. That’s what’s happening with the $3.8 billion that the Pentagon notified Congress this week would be moved from Defense into wall-building.

Here’s the notification PDF. The Trump administration is taking money out of the Joint Strike Fighter and other aircraft and weapons programs to pay for the wall, something that has even Republicans on the Armed Services Committee unhappy.

How can Trump do this? First, the Defense appropriations law allows the president to move up to $4 billion each year from one account to another. That’s Section 8005 of the annual appropriation. Here, he’s moving money from these weapons programs to the Pentagon’s counter-drug account. This vector was also used in 2019, applied to $2.5 billion in wall-building money. It shows up in yellow on this flowchart.

Second, now that it is “counter-drug” money, Trump can transfer it to the Homeland Security department to build a “counter-drug” wall. This is thanks to the nearly magical flexibility of the Defense Department’s counter-drug account, the product of a 1990 law. Let’s look at this law for a moment.

It was created at the height of the crack plague and the war on drugs. The George H.W. Bush administration and a Democratic-majority Congress had just made the U.S. military the “single lead agency” for interdicting cocaine overseas, and were clarifying what that meant. They agreed to give the Pentagon a bunch of new powers, including the ability to support U.S. law enforcement on U.S. soil if it was for the drug war. (The original law was Section 1004 of the 1991 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). It had to be renewed every few years. But the 2017 NDAA made the law permanent, as Section 284 of Title 10, U.S. Code.)

  • Ever since, a military component called Joint Task Force-North, operating from Fort Bliss outside El Paso, has been carrying out domestic support missions, mainly for CBP.
  • It gave the Defense Department the legal authority to spend its giant budget to build border barriers—as long as such barriers can be justified as “counter-drug.”
  • This same provision also allows the Defense Department to provide several types of counter-drug assistance to “foreign law enforcement agencies.” As a result, for the last 30 years, Latin American militaries and police forces have received billions of dollars in equipment upgrades, base facilities construction, training, and “intelligence analysis” services from the Defense Department.

This Defense Department’s counter-drug account—listed at the Security Assistance Monitor as “Section 1004 Counter-Drug Assistance”—quickly became the second-largest source of military and police aid to Latin America. It was a big component of Plan Colombia and of the Mérida Initiative in Mexico.

The Special Forces teams that trained many thousands of Colombian troops at the outset of Plan Colombia? The maritime bases built along Honduras’s northern coast? The drone imagery shared with Mexican forces hunting for drug kingpins? The “Interagency Task Forces” operating along Guatemala’s border with Mexico, with the jeeps famously used to intimidate the CICIG? That’s been largely Defense money, not foreign aid budget money.

It flows independently of the State Department and foreign aid budget, with poor visibility over how it’s spent. We always have a very hard time learning how much Defense counter-drug money went as aid to which countries’ security forces in the previous year.

Now, that same legal provision is authorizing the building of border walls. Money gets taken from weapons systems, transferred to the counter-drug budget, then transferred to the Homeland Security Department budget to be used for wall-building. And there’s little Congress can do about it.

The process is under challenge in the courts. Last July, though, the Supreme Court allowed this “counter-drug” money to keep flowing while lower courts slowly deliberated.

Meanwhile, this move pits the military-industrial complex (all those fighter jets, Osprey aircraft, Humvees and other equipment being cut) against the border security-industrial complex (wall construction and related technology). These are mostly different contracting companies, bringing money and employment to different congressional districts. While I don’t have a dog in this fight at all, it’ll be interesting to watch the wrangling.

January 15, 2020 — 0

Trump to Seize More Border Wall Money Through Brute Force

We learned in Monday evening’s Washington Post that our president plans to take another $7.2 billion out of the Defense Department’s budget and put it into the border wall that he couldn’t convince Congress to pay for. If he gets his way, more than three out of every four dollars in border-wall money will have gone without congressional approval.

This sort of rule by decree is what we’ve seen in Latin America when democracies start giving way to dictatorship.

A new commentary at WOLA’s website breaks down what’s happening: the amounts involved, the convoluted way Trump is wresting the money from defense and avoiding Congress’s constitutional checks, and the situation in the courts, where our only hope lies.

Here are two graphics I made for that piece.

Read the whole thing here.

December 19, 2019 — 0

Here’s a big new report about last week’s trip to El Paso and Ciudad Juárez

My visit to the border last week went well: logistics were flawless, the people we encountered were amazing, and we learned a lot. But I came home feeling disturbed. Even more than after my four visits this year to San Diego/Tijuana and to Mexico’s southern border.

Maybe it was the relentlessness of the Trump administration’s non-stop assault on some very weak people. Maybe it was the grinding fatigue that the cities’ activists and service providers exuded. But when I got home late Saturday I was having trouble relating to family and friends. I was only happy with my butt in a chair, typing up my notes and my thoughts about what I’d just seen at this part of the border.

I figured I’d write a memo about my trip. But I typed and typed. There was so much to talk about, as you can see from the table of contents below. I worked a late night Monday night, slept a lot Tuesday night (had to give a talk in Spanish on Wednesday), and last (Wednesday) night, I didn’t sleep at all: I pulled my first true all-nighter, not even a break to lie down, in many, many years.

I just wanted to get it done. So much that I saw and heard was so out of balance and awful, the holidays are nearly here, and the writing became like a form of therapy.

12,000 words, some graphics and several photos later, I posted this memo to WOLA’s website late today. It’s sprawling, and honestly I’m in no condition to judge whether it’s easy to follow. But I feel at least somewhat better for having written it.

I hope it helps you to understand what’s going on at the U.S.-Mexico border after a very trying year, and what is at stake there in the next year, for all of us whether we live at the border or not.

Hope you get something out of it too. The memo is here.

“I Can’t Believe What’s Happening—What We’re Becoming”: A memo from El Paso and Ciudad Juárez

  • The big 2019 Increase and Decline in Family Asylum Seekers
  • Box: a Terrible 2019 in el Paso and Ciudad Juárez
  • The Decimation of the U.S. Asylum System
    • Remain in Mexico
    • Metering
    • Conditions during the wait in Juárez
    • Conditions for Cubans
    • The July 16 asylum ban
    • GACA: Sending people to Guatemala
    • “PACR” and “HARP”
  • Rights Issues
    • Processing
    • Migrant deaths
    • Use of force and community relations
  • Wall Construction
  • Security in Ciudad Juárez
  • The Helpers are Exhausted
October 24, 2019 — 0

The 26 Republicans who’ve voted against Trump’s border wall “emergency”

Last week, with a 53-36 vote (59.6 percent), the U.S. Senate failed to get the two-thirds necessary to override President Trump’s veto of a resolution reversing his February 15 “national emergency” declaration. That declaration, coming after Trump failed to force Congress to pay billions for his “border wall” demands, would take more than $6 billion from the Defense Department budget and Treasury seized-asset funds, and plow it into border wall construction.

A quick rundown:

  • 2019 started with much of the U.S. government “shut down” because Congress would not pass a budget giving Trump the $5.7 billion he wanted for his border wall.
  • Finally, after a 35-day shutdown, Trump caved and signed a budget with far less wall funding.
  • On February 15, using power he claimed that the 1976 National Emergencies Act gives him, Trump declared an “emergency” at the border requiring him to move money out of defense accounts and into wall-building.
  • Court challenges to this emergency declaration are ongoing. In July, the Supreme Court allowed wall-building to proceed while judicial deliberations continue. In mid-October, though, a federal judge in El Paso froze much of the Defense Department money.

The National Emergencies Act gives Congress the ability to challenge the emergency declaration every six months, by passing a joint resolution. A 1983 Supreme Court decision allows the President to veto this resolution; the emergency declaration would then remain in place unless two thirds of both houses of Congress vote to override the presidential veto.

Twice now—in February-March and September-October—Congress has passed joint resolutions to take down Trump’s emergency declaration. Both times, Trump has vetoed the resolutions. Both times, a strong majority, but not the necessary two-thirds, has voted to override the veto.

There have now been six votes on passage and override of these joint resolutions: three in the House and three in the Senate. Not a single Democrat has voted “no” against these resolutions. Any two-thirds override vote, though, also requires a significant number of Republican votes.

Even in this polarized time, some Republicans have defied the president and voted to undo the emergency declaration. To be exact, 14 in the House and 12 in the Senate. That’s 7 percent of House Republicans, and 23 percent of Senate Republicans.

The rest of the Republican Party’s congressional delegation seems to be unconcerned about the constitutional ramifications of a president unilaterally acting in direct opposition to the clearly expressed will of a Congress that, supposedly, has “the power of the purse.”

Here are the GOP legislators who have voted to undo this authoritarian and wasteful measure. In the Senate, half are members of the Appropriations Committee, whose power to assign funds is directly challenged by the emergency declaration. Many are among the party’s few remaining moderates. Most of their votes are more about preserving Congress’s constitutional power to appropriate funds than about the wisdom of building a border wall. That’s still a principled position, and I wish more GOP legislators would take it.

Senate

  • Lamar Alexander (R-Tennessee, voted “yes” twice, did not vote once): member of Appropriations; said “I cannot support this national emergency declaration and be faithful to my oath to support the Constitution at the same time”
  • Roy Blunt (R-Missouri, voted “yes” three times): member of Appropriations; said “Those decisions should not be made without congressional action.”
  • Susan Collins (R-Maine, voted “yes” three times): member of Appropriations; said “while there is some discretion that he has to move money around, I think that his executive order exceeds his discretion”
  • Mike Lee (R-Utah, voted “yes” three times): concerned about ceding congressional power
  • Jerry Moran (R-Kansas, voted “yes” twice, did not vote once): member of Appropriations; said “The declaration of an emergency under these circumstances is a violation of the U.S. Constitution”
  • Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska, voted “yes” three times): member of Appropriations, said “This is about the administration overstepping Constitutional authority, forcing Congress to relinquish power that is fundamentally ours”
  • Rand Paul (R-Kentucky, voted “yes” three times): a libertarian; said “I can’t vote to give extra-Constitutional powers to the president”
  • Rob Portman (R-Ohio, voted “yes” three times): a relative moderate, said “the emergency declaration circumvented Congress and set a ‘dangerous new precedent’”
  • Mitt Romney (R-Utah, voted “yes” three times): a frequent Trump critic, concerned about ceding congressional power
  • Marco Rubio (R-Florida, voted “yes” twice, did not vote once): member of Appropriations, said “We have a crisis at our southern border, but no crisis justifies violating the Constitution”
  • Pat Toomey (R-Pennsylvania, voted “yes” three times): said he supports the wall, but “the emergency declaration undermines the constitutional responsibility of Congress to approve how money is spent”
  • Roger Wicker (R-Mississippi, voted “yes” three times): said he supports the wall, but “I have serious reservations as to what the Emergency Declaration might do to the Constitutional principle of checks and balances.” (Fun fact: as a member of the House in 2000, Wicker was one of few Republicans to oppose the mostly military aid package known as “Plan Colombia.”)

House

  • Justin Amash (I-Michigan, voted “yes” twice, then left the Republican Party): said “I think the President is violating our constitutional system”
  • Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pennsylvania, voted “yes” three times): said “I think this decision should be made by Congress”
  • Mike Gallagher (R-Wisconsin, voted “yes” three times): said “we can’t continue to expand executive authority just because our party now controls the White House”
  • Jamie Herrera Beutler (R-Washington, voted “yes” three times): member of Appropriations; said “He [Trump] literally contradicted the Constitution to use this money for something other than which it was intended”
  • Will Hurd (R-Texas, voted “yes” twice, did not vote once): member of Appropriations; represents a border district and has been a consistent border wall critic
  • Dusty Johnson (R-South Dakota, voted “yes” three times): said “I spent eight years under President Obama fighting ever-expanding executive authority. I remain committed to that principle”
  • John Katko (R-New York, voted “yes” twice, did not vote once): said “Presidents, from either party, should not legislate from the executive branch”
  • Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky, voted “yes” three times): said “The appropriations process belongs within Congress according to the Constitution”
  • Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Washington, voted “yes” three times): said “Article I of the Constitution gives the legislative branch the exclusive power to make laws and set funding priorities”
  • Francis Rooney (R-Florida, voted “yes” three times): said “My vote to override a veto of the resolution to rescind the national emergency declaration was based on the U.S. Constitution and had nothing to do with President Trump.” Recently made headlines by saying he is “open” to impeaching Trump
  • Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wisconsin, voted “yes” three times): said “It is imperative that no administration, Republican or Democratic, circumvent the will of Congress”
  • Elise Stefanik (R-New York, voted “yes” three times): said “No matter what Party is represented in the White House, I will stand up against executive action that circumvents Congress”
  • Fred Upton (R-Michigan, voted “yes” three times): said “declaring a national emergency and reprogramming already appropriated funds without the approval of Congress is a violation of the Constitution”
  • Greg Walden (R-Oregon, voted “yes” three times): said the “Constitution grants Congress the power of the purse, not the President”

Here are the votes:

April 15, 2019 — 0

Back to the border

I’m back from my third visit to the San Diego-Tijuana border so far this year. I spent much of Monday with U.S. authorities, CBP and Border Patrol. Tuesday was an excellent day-long meeting with non-governmental groups from all four border states. I went to Tijuana on Wednesday, and on Thursday met with civic leaders and experts in San Diego.

On Monday, an agent took me the entire length of the border wall between San Diego and Tijuana. Here, since the 2000s there’s been a double fence for much of the 14 miles from the Pacific Ocean to where the fence stops east of Tijuana, for a couple of miles, due to difficult terrain. I saw a lot of construction, as they’re replacing old fence very quickly, using money from the 2018 Homeland Security appropriation.

In one of the most densely populated areas of the entire U.S.-Mexico border, the need to spend minutes climbing a fence deters those border-crossers who’d want to avoid capture and disappear into San Diego’s southern suburbs. It doesn’t, however, deter asylum-seekers who do want to be apprehended, like thousands of children and parents from Central America. If your intention is to stand on U.S. soil, in the no-man’s land between the two rows of fencing, the outer fence is just a speed bump. The Border Patrol agent accompanying me said that the other day, a mother climbed over the 14-foot fence with a 1-year-old slung to her back.

The concertina wire that Trump’s military deployment put up can also be defeated. In this photo, it’s all tangled and pushed down by asylum-seekers climbing over. They shield themselves from the sharp edges by laying carpet over the wire, or simply risk cutting themselves.

Here’s that same spot viewed from the other side, in a hardscrabble Tijuana neighborhood not far from the San Ysidro port of entry.

The agent showed me the area where the fence ends, just east of the Nido de las Águilas neighborhood on Tijuana’s eastern periphery. Many asylum-seeking families come here too, but others have told me that this area is tightly controlled by organized crime, and migrants must pay a fee to access it.

Here’s the view behind my back when I took the previous picture. It’s the kind of terrain that resists fence-building. (And no markers to tell you where the border is.)

I went back to the Tijuana side of the San Ysidro port of entry, first thing Wednesday morning, around 7:00 AM when migrants gather to find out whether their numbers will be called from a notebook in which they’d inscribed themselves several weeks earlier. (Another line of newly arrived migrants waits to add their names.) The number denotes their turn to seek asylum the “proper” way, by entering the U.S. port of entry and presenting to a CBP officer. Last Wednesday, CBP allowed only 50 migrants to do this, which is a pretty typical number for San Ysidro.

Most asylum-seekers, though, are crossing elsewhere and turning themselves in to Border Patrol. After they process them and give them notices to appear before an asylum officer, CBP and ICE release asylum-seeking families into San Diego, where a network of charities (the San Diego Rapid Response Network) has set up a shelter to provide a short-term stay, meals, showers, clothing, and help arranging travel to where relatives or other contacts await them. (Those destinations, incidentally, tend to be agricultural areas and zones with a lot of construction—only sometimes the “sanctuary cities” where president Trump proposes to leave them.)

I pulled a few volunteer shifts with the San Diego shelter, mainly helping families get from the airport curb to their gates. The shelter was running low earlier in the week, with about 50 guests, but it had reached 300 the previous week, and by Thursday it was back up to 150. Nobody could explain the fluctuation.

I visited two Tijuana shelters, one run by a Catholic order and one by an NGO. Both were busy, but not full to capacity. Of the nine sectors into which Border Patrol divides the border, San Diego is fourth in arrivals of families and fifth in unaccompanied children. Despite news of “caravans” in Tijuana, far more kids and parents are coming right now to El Paso, south Texas, and Yuma, Arizona.

Homeless men along the paved-over Tijuana River, about a half-mile south of the border. Many are deportees from the United States.

After three visits to the same area in four months, the border feels much more familiar. I still don’t really understand much of what goes on here, though. I don’t have a feel for the rhythms of work and life. I don’t understand how some residents are totally binational while others rarely even think about the other country in plain view on the other side.

Like a lot of northeastern cities—Washington included—this place combines a transient and diverse population, vast differences in wealth, and a big security presence. But it’s starker here: this is a place where semi-skilled people on one side of the line make $8.80 per day, and those on the other side make at least that in an hour. Where 14 people were killed in one April day one one side of the line, but it took two months last year to reach that total on the other side. The photos help, but it’s still really hard to describe this place to people here in Washington.

February 4, 2019 — 0

A twisty riverbank explains why a wall won’t stop 60 percent of today’s migrants

Here’s Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) during last week’s House-Senate Conference Committee meeting on the 2019 federal budget, which hinges on President Trump’s demand for a border wall. Cuellar is pointing to a map of the U.S.-Mexico border in his district.

“We have a river that doesn’t run straight,” he says, reminding his colleagues that past fencing built in the area has often had to get put up as much as a mile inland from the actual border. It’s impossible to build a sinuous fence following the contours of the river’s bank, right in the middle of an active floodplain.

Remember this map anytime someone tries to tell you that a border wall will stop Central Americans, or anyone else, from crossing onto U.S. soil to petition for asylum. In South Texas, there’s no way to keep people from rafting across and setting foot on U.S. soil, where they can await the arrival of Border Patrol agents and ask to apply for asylum. If you’re between the river and the wall, you’re still on U.S. soil, and no “metering” can steer you away.

“Congress has already funded 33 miles (53 kilometers) of new barrier construction here” in south Texas the AP’s Nomaan Merchant reported in late January. “But much of that new barrier will be built north of the Rio Grande, which carves a natural boundary between the U.S. and Mexico. That means migrants will still be able to reach American soil in front of the newly constructed barrier and request asylum.”

Nearly 60 percent of everyone whom Border Patrol is apprehending right now are children and families, most of them asking for protection. In Texas, a wall wouldn’t change that at all.

January 6, 2019 — 0

What would happen if Trump declares a national emergency?

From today’s Guardian (UK).

I’ve edited this post to reflect that I got it wrong and we’re screwed: a joint resolution requires the President’s signature, or for Congress to override his veto, which is unlikely. This is the result of a 1983 Supreme Court decision. My updates are indicated with italics and strikethroughs.

President Trump keeps hinting that, perhaps within the next few days, he may declare a “state of emergency” at the border and order U.S. military personnel to build a wall. This would allow him to build a wall despite the deadlocked debate currently shutting down the U.S. government. He could call it an “emergency” and go against the intent of Congress, spending money—apparently from Defense Department military construction or operations and maintenance funds—that was not appropriated for wall-building.

Such a move would break longstanding norms about the use of presidential power without checks and balances in our democracy. It would also violate longstanding norms about the use of the U.S. military on U.S. soil. And according to Yale law professor Bruce Ackerman, an emergency declaration would not only “be illegal, but if members of the armed forces obeyed his command, they would be committing a federal crime.”

But what would happen if Trump did it anyway? The National Emergencies Act of 1976 (Chapter 34 of Title 50 of the U.S. Code) is pretty clear about what comes next.

  • Congress can vote to strike down a national emergency declaration by passing a joint resolution (a bill that doesn’t require requires the president’s signature). In fact, whether Congress wants to do so or not, the law requires it to meet, within six months of an emergency declaration, to consider whether to vote on a joint resolution.
  • The House of Representatives, with its big new Democratic Party majority, would be virtually certain to approve a joint resolution to shut down Trump’s emergency declaration. After such a resolution gets introduced, the House technically has 15 days to get it out of committee and 3 more days to debate and vote on the floor. But Speaker Pelosi’s House would probably approve a joint resolution rejecting a state of emergency before the ink even dried on the president’s proclamation.
  • The joint resolution would then go to the Senate. The National Emergencies Act would then give the Senate fifteen days to get it through committee, and three days for the full chamber to debate and vote on it. (The Senate could also hold a vote not to consider the resolution—but that amounts to a vote on the resolution.)
  • It’s not clear what would happen in the Senate. Though president Trump’s Republican Party holds a 53-to-47 seat majority, the Senate is not guaranteed to uphold a “national emergency” declaration for military wall-building. The handful of moderate Republicans, some of them Trump critics, would be uncomfortable with the process and unenthusiastic about spending billions on a border wall. Even some conservative Republicans would be uncomfortable with using the National Emergencies Act to circumvent Congress’s power to appropriate money. Some would also be troubled about using the military for such a long-term domestic mission.
  • We would probably see days of tense, high-stakes political theater, but there is some likelihood (30 to 70 percent?) that the Senate would also approve a joint resolution striking down Trump’s emergency declaration. Unfortunately, Trump would then be able to veto the resolution. Overriding that veto would require the votes of two-thirds of both houses of Congress, which is unlikely. The national emergency would stand.
  • But wWhat if the Senate disagrees with the House? The National Emergencies Act foresees this. “In the case of any disagreement between the two Houses of Congress,” the law explains, both houses must name representatives to a conference committee, which would then have six days to file a report that the House and Senate would have to vote on within another six days. In other words, the two houses are required to compromise, then vote on the compromise agreement.
  • This is where things get vague. What if the two houses are still deadlocked? “In the event the conferees are unable to agree within forty-eight hours, they shall report back to their respective Houses in disagreement,” the law reads.

What happens then? I don’t know—you’d better ask a constitutional lawyer. Because if the situation reaches that point, the United States would find itself in one of the worst constitutional crises in its history.

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