WASHINGTON: Today President Trump journey’s to Calexico to inspect the first section of wall completed under his administration has resulted in his saying.

“The system is full. We cannot take you anymore. Asylum, illegal immigration. We cannot take you anymore. So turn around, that is the way it is.” – President Trump

Over the last few days a lot of people, including former DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson, are admitting that yes. We have a crisis on the border.





In a Morning Joe interview, Johnson says:

“When I was in office in Kirstjen Nielsen’s job, at her desk, I’d get to work around 6:30 in the morning and there’d be my intelligence book sitting on my desk, the PDB, and also the apprehension numbers from the day before,” Johnson said. “And I’d look at them every morning, it’d be the first thing I’d look at. And I probably got too close to the problem, and my staff will tell you if it was under 1,000 apprehensions the day before that was a relatively good number, and if it was above 1,000 it was a relatively bad number, and I was gonna be in a bad mood the whole day.”

“On Tuesday, there were 4,000 apprehensions. I know that a thousand overwhelms the system. I cannot begin to imagine what 4,000 a day looks like, so we are truly in a crisis,” Johnson explained.

Something the President has been saying for more than two years.

The President’s rhetoric increasing with the number of people taking unheard-of risks with themselves and children in order to cross the U.S. / Mexico border.

The US-Mexico border is 1,954 miles (3,145km) long. It includes areas of vast deserts and mountains in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. About 654 miles of that have some sort of manmade barrier, most built after 2006, such as fencing or a wall.

The President says we have put in 82 miles of the wall up to date, by the end of this year we have 97 miles of the wall from Texas to California.

We will have another 277 miles of border wall in the next year.

In the meantime, the President is willing to use all tools at his disposal. Reducing ad, increasing tariffs, even closing the border-crossing points, if Mexico does not assist the U.S. in stopping the surge presently overwhelming our border. The President highlighted that the surge includes human, particularly child, sex trafficking and massive amounts of drugs that are killing 70,000 Americans a year.

It is a crisis, the President says. It is a crisis others are slowly saying

On Tuesday, Texas Senate Republicans passed a resolution declaring a crisis at the Texas-Mexico border. They are requesting that Congress fully fund “all means necessary” to secure the border even as Senate Democrats cried foul. (Texas Senate declares migrant surge an emergency)





Nonetheless, Senate Resolution 535 passed in a party-line vote, 19 to 12, last Tuesday afternoon.

Texas’ Republican Senators are asking Congress to deploy agents, implement technology, and “erect barriers where needed.” The bill also says that the

“Texas Senate supports the President in his efforts to move forward with emergency action.”

State Sen. Paul Bettencourt, saying.

“I think there’s no question that, speaking with a voice that recognizes the obvious, there is a crisis at the border,” he said.

Ongoing angry Democrats

Democratic senators rebuked the resolution, authored in part by Bettencourt, claiming that the resolution did not go through the normal committee process. Thus, saying Democrats were caught unaware by the measure and unprepared to testify against it.

Bettencourt says the urgency of the crisis requires a rapid response saying that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security predicts that 100,000 migrants would be intercepted at the border in March 2019, the highest monthly total in a decade.

State Sen. Royce West, D-Dallas, moved to refer the bill to the Veterans Affairs and Border Security Committee, but the motion failed in a party-line vote.

“Senator, I don’t disagree with you that this needs to be discussed. I disagree with the process by which we are discussing it,” West said. “This is a very substantive resolution that every member should have the opportunity to present testimony on, and we didn’t have that opportunity — at all. If it’s going to be a partisan issue, that’s fine. Let’s call it what it is.”

Congress and the end of the border crisis road

Multiple administrations going back decades have been kicking the immigration can down the road. The Republican Congress, led by Speaker Paul Ryan, flat out lied to the President in June of 2018. The New York Times writing (Paul Ryan Promises House Immigration Bill in Election Season By Thomas Kaplan and Nicholas Fandos)

“Hoping to defuse a Republican rebellion, Speaker Paul D. Ryan promised Thursday that House Republicans would draft compromise legislation on immigration, setting up a showdown on one of the thorniest political issues just as the midterm campaign comes into focus.”