Trump seeks path for Mexico barrier, but will it be a ‘big, beautiful wall?’

By Amy Chozik and Manny Fernandez

Tuesday, Dec. 27, 2016 | 2 a.m.

President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team has asked federal border protection officials for guidance on where a new wall separating the United States from Mexico — a signature promise of Trump’s campaign — can be erected, according to a Democratic congressman from Texas who opposes the idea.

But the officials exploring possible paths for such a barrier also appear to be considering fencing and other options short of the “big, beautiful wall” that Trump regularly vowed to erect, at Mexico’s expense, along a border of more than 1,900 miles.

The discussions with federal border officials, along with separate talks with city officials in Laredo, Texas, one of the busiest crossings, come as aides to Trump maintain that construction of a border wall will be a top priority of his administration.

In an interview, Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, whose district includes a 200-mile stretch of border and reaches 150 miles north, to San Antonio, said that the chief patrol agents from two border sectors in the state had contacted him this month. They said they were doing so at the request of the incoming administration, Cuellar said, and solicited his ideas for where such a wall, or a fence, should be built.

“I’m one of the few congressmen who doesn’t have a fence in his area,” Cuellar said. “They asked us to put some locations down, so we talked about areas they’d proposed and some infrastructure, whether it’s a wall or fencing.”

The chief patrol agents, whom an aide to Cuellar identified as Mario Martinez of the Laredo sector and Manuel Padilla Jr. of the Rio Grande Valley sector, declined to comment, as did a spokesman for Customs and Border Protection, Carlos Diaz.

According to Cuellar, the agents said they had argued against the transition team’s request, and shared his view that it would be impossible to wall or fence off Laredo, a city of 255,000 and the busiest inland port on the U.S. side of the border. They said the transition team had insisted.

“The Trump headquarters came back and said no,” Cuellar said he was told. “The Trump people wanted to see suggestions as to where a fence or wall could be put.”

A spokesman for the transition, Jason Miller, declined to comment.

Cuellar was not the only Texas elected official approached by border officials about where to place a new barrier.

The mayor of Laredo, Pete Saenz, said in an interview that officials from the Border Patrol’s Laredo sector had approached the city manager with plans for removing vegetation and installing additional fencing, lighting, roads, surveillance equipment and other security measures along portions of the border.

The plan did not mention a wall, said Saenz, a Democrat, which he said was “frankly, a big relief.” But he said it included details about fencing that would be placed for short distances along key parts of the city on the border, including a water plant.

Though it could gratify Trump’s political supporters, erecting a new barrier would carry great significance in Laredo, which is across the Rio Grande from Nuevo Laredo, in Tamaulipas, Mexico. It has developed close ties with its sister city and grown into a trade hub.

Walling off Laredo, Cuellar said, would damage the flow of commerce, among other things. “It’s a 14th-century solution to a 21st-century problem,” he said.

But both he and Saenz sounded less than adamantly opposed to additional border fences.

Some fencing already stands in vast portions of the 1,254-mile border between Texas and Mexico, Saenz noted.

“I would have no problem with it if it’s strategically placed and it’s well designed,” Saenz said. “In other words, if it doesn’t look too prisonlike. I think if we had a road, possibly a fence, and then lighting, I think that would help. I don’t think the folks here would be too, too upset.

“But the nature of a huge wall, concrete and that sort of thing, is upsetting,” he continued. “We have a very close relationship with Mexico, especially the commerce that comes to our city, and a huge wall would obviously be offensive to Mexico and to the people that do business with Mexico here.”

Saenz recalled that the Border Patrol years ago installed steel fencing along the perimeter of a community college on the border, which he said had deterred illegal border crossers from coming onto campus.

“To be honest with you, I think we were happy with it,” he said. “I think it took care of the problem.”

No promise by Trump came to symbolize his campaign more than his call for a wall with Mexico to stop the flow of undocumented immigrants, and his top aides, including Reince Priebus, who is to serve as his chief of staff, say it remains a priority — though they have offered no further information on how a wall would be financed.

At the same time, border migration is shifting: Mexicans, whom Trump demonized during his campaign, are leaving the United States in greater numbers than they are arriving, according to the Pew Research Center. But Central Americans fleeing violence in their home countries are pouring across the border, often welcoming arrest by the Border Patrol as a first step toward seeking asylum.

“We have the lowest northbound apprehensions in modern history,” despite spending a record $19.5 billion on border enforcement, said Rep. Beto O’Rourke, a Democrat from El Paso.

“Additional walls or fences, physical or virtual, are not a good use of taxpayer resources,” he said. “And they also pose the risk of taking our eyes off threats where they are known to exist or likely to be, and that happens not to be at the border with Mexico.”