Trump Holds Campaign Event at Border Wall Obama Built

Border Patrol union leader Paul A. Perez called the standing fence "Trump wall" and the idle parts "Kamala wall," after his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.

"Where you were, that was kind of a joke today," said John Ladd, a Trump supporter whose ranch extends along the border, explained while driving the dirt road along the barrier, the gapped panels making a flipbook out of the shrubby trees and grass on the other side. "Had to be in front of Trump's wall, but you went to Montezuma, and that's Obama's wall."

The Cochise County Sheriff's Office confirmed that the barrier next to Thursday's campaign stop was built during the Obama administration. The Trump campaign and Perez did not respond to questions about the discrepancy.

It truly amazes me that Trump supporters allow themselves to be played over and over again by the repeated incompetence of himself and his team. Trump's been out of office for nearly 4 years, yet his advisors chose a border spot that Obama had constructed and allowed Trump to praise it while his own incomplete wall materials lay gathering dust in the hot sun, while he incorrectly juxtaposed both.

Kamala Harris and her team have been able to take the reigns from a flailing, moribund presidential campaign and in less than one month turn it into a steaming juggernaut, amassing $500 Billion in donations mostly from small donors able to potentially contribute multiple times before the election. They pulled off the most energized and electric convention in the history of televised conventions and turned most polls completely around while expanding the electorate in ways President Biden was wholly unable to. She chose a VP that most of Americans couldn't have identified in July to America's favorite dad and coach today while introducing America to two families representative of the middle class and its core values with nary a personal grievance in sight other than Walz' Golden Rule - Mind Your Own Damn Business!

It would be one thing if Trump and his minions ever showed competence instead of seemingly reprising skits from the Three Stooges without the attendant canned laughs and sound effects. I mean, I can even hear Curly bellowing his Yuck, yuck, yuck as the rancher tells Trump that he wrongly misidentified and praised Obama's fence and criticized his own millions of dollars of taxpayer-funded fence lying in the dirt, unfinished. That anyone with unjaundiced eyes can't see the total dysfunction remains a mystery to me, and why anyone thinks this is what America needs in 2024 forever escapes any rational person's sensible ideal of good governance.

You want the issue.....not a solution.

Sometimes you puzzle me. Why would you think any rational person thinks that an expensive wall that can never be fully completed makes an iota of sense?

You're trying to conflate a disinterest in border security with the wall, and that dog doesn't hunt. An unguarded wall is not a totally effective deterrent as the story established.

Smugglers have breached the barrier thousands of times, including while Trump was in office. The wall has been tunneled under and climbed over. It has been walked around and sawed through. It has not stopped migration any more that it has stopped drug and human smuggling, most of which happens at ports of entry.

Policy experts say the barrier simply shifts where and how migrants cross the border. And many experts argue that U.S. immigration policy and conditions in migrants' home countries are what drive migration, regardless of the obstacles placed in their path to reaching the United States.

And the latter concerns were what Kamala Harris was charged in changing and has had success by getting multinational corporations to expand production facilities into Central American countries to provide jobs where the migrants live. This, along with getting nations in-between the migrants' countries to tighten their efforts in stemming the flow before migrants reach America. A wall does none of those things.

But this story was posted by me for one specific reason: Donald Trump is too stupid and uninterested in facts and truth to even realize that he was touting actual wall that was built during the Obama Administration while decrying his own ineptness/corruption in paying for expensive wall components and THEN not bothering to have them actually put into place to function as designed. And then he juxtaposed reality to bend to his own propensity of pompous lying and gaslighting, probably oblivious to the truth until the Trump-supporting rancher told him to his face. Trump could have gone to wall he actually had built, but he didn't. Such is his lack of concern for real solutions to real problems. All he cares about is the politics.

It's something to run on.....but it's not a solution.

And I told you in my response what effective solutions look like, the very things that have brought today's numbers of crossings to lows not seen in years. I also posted multiple threads telling the truth about Kamala Harris' role in bringing about a number of these changes by her work with allies and governments in other countries that have ZERO to do with physically visiting our actual Southern border and building any more hyper-expensive walls that are ineffective and only cause migrants to chose other routes where walls don't exist.

Even as Trump has made immigration central to his bid to take back the White House, border apprehensions have declined dramatically this summer amid the Biden administration's new asylum restrictions and stepped-up enforcement in Mexico. In July, illegal border crossings, which rose to record levels during the Biden administration, declined to the lowest levels in almost four years, after the administration enacted sweeping measures to limit asylum access. - FTA

Early in the administration, Ms. Harris was given a role that came to be defined as a combination of chief fund-raiser and conduit between business leaders and the economies of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. Her attempt to convince companies across the world to invest in Central America and create jobs for would-be migrants had some success, according to immigration experts and current and former government officials.

Rather than develop ways to turn away or detain migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border, Ms. Harris's work included encouraging a Japan-based auto parts plant, Yazaki, to build a $10 million plant in a western Guatemalan region that sees high rates of migration and pushing a Swiss-based coffee company to increase procurement by more than $100 million in a region rich with coffee beans.

She convened leaders from dozens of companies, helping to raise more than $5 billion in private and public funds.

"Not a huge amount, but it ain't chicken feed and that links to jobs," said Mark Schneider, who worked with Latin American and Caribbean nations as a senior official at the United States Agency for International Development during the Clinton administration.

As usual, Democrats put in the hard, tireless work out of sight from the media and certainly Trump lovers. That work HAS decreased border crossings - in concert with Mexico stepping up efforts inside their own country because of positive engagement - something Trump is wholly unable to countenance. Wanna see the situation get worse again? Then let Trump refocus billions upon border walls that don't work while denigrating governments currently working with the US in attempts to keep migrants from even reaching our border by giving them solid jobs in the countries where they live.

That isn't politics, it's policy in effect and working.

Much easier to defraud the government by skyrocketing the cost of hotel rooms, food and drink prices and golf cart rentals charged to the secret service.

And don't forget foreign governments, lobbyists and any business wanting to curry favor stayed-at and frequented his DC hotel to the tune of tens of millions in revenues for Trump Inc.

Thebull asks a valid question. Obama built some wall it appears.....so explain your "why would any rational person think than an expensive wall....."

You're tedious today Ebs. The question was already answered.

...the Obama portion of the wall was part of the previous administration's border policy and funding.

Evidently, Obama didn't have a choice on spending the money already passed for building that particular portion of the wall.

And you know as well as I, perception is reality. If people perceive that a border wall is an effective means to stem illegal entry, the truth isn't going to phase them.

It certainly hasn't phased Trump, has it?

#26

Three economists ran the numbers on Trump's border wall. They find it's a bad investment.

The U.S. border with Mexico is about 2,000 miles long, and a third of it (700 miles) has a wall or fence. Economists Treb Allen of Dartmouth College and Cau Dobbin and Melanie Morten of Stanford University modeled what would happen if Trump were able to cover two-thirds of the border (1,300 miles) with some sort of wall.

Their conclusion? It would hurt the U.S. economy because there would be fewer workers and lower output. It would also have a tiny impact on illegal immigration, and U.S. workers wouldn't be better off.

"Our research shows that building a wall was an ineffective way of reducing migration," Allen said after presenting the new research paper this weekend at the American Economic Association conference. "It was expensive to build, and it harmed U.S. workers."

On top of the cost to build the wall, the U.S. economy would lose more than $4 billion a year, the economists calculated, meaning the country would forfeit nearly $30,000 in lost economic output for each Mexican migrant the wall stops.

The Secure Fence Act - which Sens. Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Charles E. Schumer voted for - was a large expansion of barriers and checkpoints at the border that cost $2.3 billion (or $7 per person in the United States).

The Secure Fence Act of 2006, which triggered the construction of walls and fences along 548 miles of the border between 2007 and 2010.

The Secure Fence Act resulted in a 0.6 percent decline in migration (about 83,000 fewer Mexican workers), the economists found.

The Obama-Biden Administration Built More than 100 Miles of Border Wall.

In 2006 then-President Bush signed the Secure Fence Act, which called for the -------- of hundreds of miles of barriers along the U.S.-Mexico border. The Bush Administration intended to build 700 miles by December of 2008, when his second term would come to an end. By April of 2008 then-Homeland Security Secretary Chertoff had issued waivers that swept aside dozens of federal laws and "all federal, state, or other laws, regulations and legal requirements of, deriving from, or related to the subject of" the named laws for all of the planned border walls.

By the end of President Bush's time in office the U.S.-Mexico border was lined with 278 miles of 15-to-18-foot-tall pedestrian fence and 248 miles of vehicle barrier, for a total of 526 miles. Of those, 135 miles had been built prior to the passage of the Secure Fence Act.

The Obama-Biden Administration would oversee construction of an additional 128 miles of border wall.

There were also numerous locations where pre-existing border walls were replaced under the Obama-Biden administration, including some in El Paso, Texas; near Naco, Arizona; and where the wall between San Diego and Tijuana enters the Pacific Ocean. Sections of border wall that were swept away by flooding at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, near Nogales, Arizona, and through Andrade, California, were rebuilt during those eight years as well.