Shuffling money to wall threatens future abuses
Following the refusal by Congress to allocate billions for the border wall, President Trump declared a national emergency and has used at least two loopholes to defy Congress’ “power of the purse,” reallocating a total of $6.1 billion of Defense Department funding. Earlier, $2.5 billion was diverted from money that Congress allocated for drug interdiction, claiming the wall will do that work better than the programs originally intended. Perhaps, but wasn’t that for Congress to decide?
Now, the Pentagon has released the list of more than 125 construction projects at military bases that will lose funding; at least temporarily. Among the projects is an $89 million pier at Naval Base Kitsap in Bangor that would have been used by the Maritime Force Protection Unit, which escorts submarines and their crews on their way to and from the Bangor naval base. The Bangor project was one of the largest individual projects, among a range of facilities that included weapon maintenance shops, equipment facilities, fire stations, roads, small arms ranges, care centers for service members and even schools for the children of military families.
The shuffling of money may be felt hardest in Puerto Rico, where $400 million in military construction was planned to support recovery efforts following Hurricane Maria. Another $770 million had been allocated for military projects at U.S. bases in Europe, where the United States already faces strained relations with NATO countries as well as the potential for Russian aggression.
Doubts remain about whether Trump’s wall is even an effective tool to slow the pace of illegal immigration.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported that illegal border crossings fell to 64,000 in August, down from 144,000 in May, and without any new sections of wall.
Additionally, illegal border crossings have never made up a significant percentage of undocumented immigrants. When it was still tracking these numbers, the Department of Homeland Security found that between October 2016 and September 2017, 700,000 foreigners in the United States, having arrived by plane or ship, were without documentation because they had overstayed their visas. A wall won’t fix that problem. During that same period, illegal border crossings numbered about 106,000.
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