Monday, July 6, 2020 | 2 a.m.
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The scope of the wastefulness and ineffectiveness of President Donald Trump’s border wall grows increasingly obvious.
Take two back-to-back developments from last week in the project.
First came news from The Washington Post that the Trump administration had awarded a major contract for construction of a “virtual wall” that uses sophisticated motion-sensing technology and artificial intelligence to alert border agents to illegal crossings. Great idea — so great that opponents of building a steel barrier have been arguing for years that it was the best way to go in all but the most heavily traveled sections of the border where there have been barriers for many years. Pilot testing showed the virtual wall was effective, too.
Meanwhile, as reported by ProPublica and the Texas Tribune, a privately funded section of border wall in the Lone Star State is in danger of falling into the Rio Grande after being built too close to the river. The three-mile section, which the builder used as leverage to later obtain more than $1.7 billion worth of federal contracts, is being weakened by soil erosion at its base. Unless it’s fixed, it will need to be replaced or removed — no doubt with a hugely expensive federal contract.
These are just two stories in one week showing the futility of Trump’s wall and his administration’s inability to properly manage anything in this nation, even his pet projects. But the inadequacies have been well documented over the years. Here’s how things are going with the “big, beautiful” wall:
• Climbers using simple rope ladders have easily scaled it.
• Smugglers routinely cut through it using power saws that can be purchased at home improvement stores for less than $100.
• A section of the wall in Calexico, Calif., blew down in a stiff wind.
• After Trump claimed that a test involving 20 mountain climbers proved “this wall can’t be climbed,” climbers using a replica of the wall debunked the claim by scaling it without ladders or ropes in as little as 75 seconds. One of the successful climbers was an 8-year-old girl who took mere seconds to get over the wall.
Meanwhile, as before Trump got elected, the majority of drugs and other contraband flowing into the U.S. are coming through legal ports of entry that were hardened decades ago.
Clearly, spending another dime to build a barrier in remote areas is a waste of taxpayer dollars. At a time when the nation needs all the resources it has to battle the coronavirus pandemic and provide emergency financial assistance to the millions of Americans who are out of work, it’s unconscionable to put public funding into more sections of useless physical border wall.
Border security is needed, no question. But it can be done virtually at less cost than putting up steel, as shown by the pilot tests of the electronic system — something Trump once ridiculed but now is funding through a contract with a California-based technology startup.
The system can not only spot motion at the border but uses artificial intelligence to differentiate between humans and animals. It then sends mapping information directly to the phones of border agents, who can dispatch vehicles or aircraft.
The Post reported that although the contract didn’t specify an amount of funding for the project, the deal would be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Another enormous benefit of the virtual wall is that unlike a physical barrier, it doesn’t destroy the environment or desecrate culturally sensitive areas.
This is the way to go — not an obsolete steel monument to Trump’s xenophobia and dullheadedness. Let’s just pray the contract isn’t another gift by Trump to an unqualified donor that we’ll have to replace in a year or two.
