Part 1 of "Promises Made; Promises Kept" 'Build a wall' -- and make Mexico pay for it

RESPONSE TO MIKE PENCE ON 2020 INTERVIEW

[DAILY CALLER, February 11, 2020, https://dailycaller.com/2020/02/11/mike-pence-2020-impeachment-abortion-pelosi/?utm_source=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=11931]

Uncommonly, I am going to respond to and clarify statements that Pence made in his interview with Daily Caller. Having watched that interview, I felt as if I had seen a piece of "state propaganda," a feeling that I and many others have all too often since the outset of the Trump administration. Pence begins with a slogan of "Promises Made, Promises Kept," but he fails to enumerate the number of promises made & kept, nor does he give the full particulars of even a single one of those promises. Politifact has identified what they saw as Trump's top ten campaign promises:

1. 'Build a wall' -- and make Mexico pay for it
2. Temporarily ban Muslims from coming into the United States
3. 'Bring manufacturing (jobs) back'
4. Impose tariffs on goods made in China and Mexico
5. Renegotiate or withdraw from the North American Free Trade Agreement and Trans-Pacific Partnership
6. 'Full repeal of Obamacare' and replace it with a market-based alternative
7. Renegotiate the Iran deal
8. Leave Social Security as is
9. Cut taxes
10. 'Bomb' and/or 'take the oil' from ISIS  https://www.politifact.com/article/2016/jul/15/donald-trumps-top-10-campaign-promises/

Build a wall’ – and make Mexico pay for it

                In February 2019 Trump declare a state of emergency at the US southern border because more migrants were entering the country. The number of immigrants was higher than the previous two months but not the highest in overall terms. Some speculated that the announcement of a government spending deal may have precipitated people in making it across the border, counter to the downward trend of attempts in the previous two months. Was the emergency legitimate or simply a ploy for Trump to declare a national emergency to free up funds from within our government to fund the border wall? And what was the emergency? The uptick of more families with children trying to get through a legal port of entry & being turned away because of the newly instituted policies? Building the wall hardly seems a relevant response to an overflow of families. Yet, neither does separation & incarceration. Trump focused solely on building the border wall rather than addressing the real issues of why people were migrating, the number of people who needed to be dealt with as well as the effect of any change of policy on more effectively dealing with that issue, or refraining from taking actions that infringed on human rights. Trump initiated policies and procedures that were crueler than before.

                Some would say, “but he was focusing on his campaign promise.” Really? Which promise is that? The one where he promised that Mexico would pay for it? Can you have kept a promise if you only when it turns out you don’t fulfill the whole promise? Do you want a President to take draconian measures against innocent people, human beings like the rest of us, to fulfill half of a promise?  Yet, still a promise that has not seen a fulfillment of either portion.

                No, instead of being up front and telling people that the border wall may have to postponed or the time extended as funding becomes available, Trump tries to do the old “rob Peter to pay Paul” ploy. Isn’t that the principal upon which the Ponzi scam is built? Or is it the old shell game, keep your eye on the funding, here it is under the military budget shell. Keep watching. Which shell do you think it is under? Laugh. No, it has magically reappeared under the border wall budget shell. In 2019 $2.5 billion disappears from the military counter drug program & reappears in border wall construction. This year $3.5 billion is supposed to magically transfer from the military counterdrug programs as well $3.7 billion from the military construction fund to reappear in the border wall budget – five times the amount that the Congress authorized for the project in the 2020 budget.

                A federal judge in Seattle ruled recently that Trump cannot have Washington state’s $88 million piece of the military construction pie. She ruled that the declaration of a state of emergency and siphoning money from the Pentagon to the border wall is illegal. Gasp of disbelief! Our President try to do something illegal?

                So, what has been accomplished in building Trump’s wall?  Of the 205 miles that have been appropriated for at $6.1 million, 46.7 have been built. What happened to the other three-quarters of the $6.1 million dollars, if only a quarter of the wall has been built?  This year’s $7.2 million of siphoned-off funds is supposed to provide for eighteen projects totally 309 miles. Shouldn’t the $4.6 million dollars that had been allotted previously be accounted for before an additional $7.2 million gets added into the shell game?

                After the realization was made that the constructed wall had mainly replaced dilapidated barriers, people began to question the efficiency and efficacy of the existing wall and whether more wall would be any more effective.  Now, one of the new eighteen projects is being awarded by using funding appropriated from Congress. Is this part or all the previously money which seemed to have gone missing? Border Protection has estimated that each mile of wall construction costs approximately $17 million. Wait, wait… how did 46.7 miles get built? If each mile costs about $17 million and they previously had $6.1 million and did use all of it, that accounts for each mile costing about $.13 million. Even others have said that each mile of wall built in Texas has cost $30 million. Who does have oversight on the cost of the project and the awarding of contracts? I would like to know this as Trump begins a concerted effort to build more faster before the 2020 election.

Gus Bova of the Texas Observer sums up Trump’s wall accomplishment in the following fashion:

After nearly three years in office, Donald Trump is months behind schedule on his signature campaign promise -- and he's fending of criticism from both the right and left about his sluggish progress. To date, Trump has completed only 80-some miles of border fencing, nearly of of which replaced smaller existing barriers in California and the Southwest. In Texas, he's only managed to replace a few miles of fence in El Paso, break ground on a couple tiny stretches of new wall in the Rio Grande Valley, and clear some federal wildlife refuge land. If this were a Manhattan real estate deal, Trump presumably would have fired the guy in charge.

And the BBC explains -- Trump wall -- all you need to know about US border in seven charts. Yes, the purely analytical and financially centered observation of the promise, the accomplishment, the pitfalls, and the questionable. Yet, instead of simply those observations, I see tear-stained faces of fathers, mothers, and children captured or restricted at the southern border. I do not see dollar signs.

Promise made, promise kept? Only fractionally and at what financial and human cost? The U.S. has become and abuser of human rights. How many people would have been happy if that had been proposed initially as part of the promise?