The border is in emergency. Latest news, a gargantuan fentanyl bust at the border, showing how dangerous the tide of illegally procured opiates is. At least three huge caravans of illegal immigrants, totalling more than 12,500 uneducated, unskilled, Central Americans, are about to roll in. President Trump has shown a willingness to actually shut the government down in a desperate bid to get a handle on the free-for-all engulfing the U.S. southern border.

With pork. For their buddies. As they always do.

Breitbart News' Joel Pollak reports that their big $8 billion rollout for border security features ... an icebreaker. For the U.S. and Canadian northern border:

Democrats unveiled their proposal for addressing the crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border this week, and it includes funding for a new polar icebreaker for the U.S. Coast Guard. The proposal, unveiled Wednesday at the first meeting of the conference committee to negotiate a bipartisan solution, was presented by Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-CA), and is the Democratic Party’s official position.

The icebreaker offer will cost anywhere from $700 million to $1 billion, depending on how many are bought. (The U.S. seems to get wholesale rates for buying in bulk.) With a total offer reportedly maybe totaling around $8 billion according to some scattered news reports, that's going to take a chunk.

With the southern border in crisis, leave it to the Democrats to focus on what's going on at Alaska's northern coast.

Lotta drugs and illegals rolling in that way, right. Lotta security to worry about up there.

Now, far be it from me to say the U.S. doesn't need an icebreaker. It does. The Russians are going wild with their own icebreakers in a bid to take over the Arctic Circle. It is a strategic issue. It's important. But it's not a border security issue.

What it is, is changing the subject.

They'll pay for anything so long as it's not a wall. Yet they want credit for walls, apparently knowing how important it is to the public. McClatchy has an excellent news story about how Democrats are calling their border measures, which don't include walls, walls.

Jim Clyburn wants to call his border security plan a wall, even though it’s really not. Clyburn, the third-ranking House Democrat, is proposing what he calls a “smart wall,” a border security strategy that uses technology, not concrete. The South Carolina congressman explained his “wall” would involve drones, scanners, and sensors “to create a technological barrier too high to climb over, too wide to go around, and too deep to burrow under.” His terminology matters because Democrats have signaled they’re willing to make a deal on border security that, at least rhetorically, would include some sort of barrier. They just need to label their plan carefully, and finding the right words and tone is going to be a major theme as congressional negotiators continue to seek a deal next week. In other words, they want credit for a wall with the public, but they don't want an actual wall. Drones, scanners and sensors are good for intelligence-gathering, but they sure as heck aren't going to stop anyone from entering. And an icebreaker up north sure does beef the money to be spent up, so as to appear 'serious' but it does utterly nothing about the actual crisis supposedly being addressed. And it's accompanied by Democrats doing what they always do, which is rewarding their cronies. According to the New York Times:

Democrats also insisted on their own priorities beyond homeland security. They proposed new funding to improve Customs and Border Protection’s care for migrants in the agency’s custody, expanding an “alternatives to detention” program at Immigration and Customs Enforcement to keep families together while reducing the number of ICE detention beds and requiring more frequent detention-facility inspections.

That's lots of money for social services workers and ACORN-like NGOs with activist sidelines - read: electing Democrats. And it's lots of incentive for more migrants to immigrate here illegally. They've got an illegal immigrant-industrial complex to support, and they want to shower it with more money.

None of this is border security because none of it keeps illegals and criminals on the southern border actually out.

Trump should take the icebreaker, turn down pork for NGOs incentivizing more illegal immigration, and just tell the Democrats to heck with their stupid games. And he should make what's going on clear in the State of the Union. The nation is under seige. It's time to declare an emergency and just build the wall.

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