The semantics, however, are anything but trivial. If the White House and House Democrats are to reach a deal to avert another government shutdown by the Feb. 15 deadline, they must first reach a rough détente over what they are talking about — in particular, the definition of Trump’s “wall,” and of “border security,” the Democrats’ catchall description of their own approach.
“There’s no magic glossary telling you the difference between a fence and wall or a barrier, they are kind of interchangeable,” said Jeh Johnson, who served as President Barack Obama’s homeland security secretary from 2013 to 2017.
“There is a distinction between governing and political rhetoric, and people should not get trapped in the binary,” Johnson said. “The moment when we reach a compromise on the vocabulary is the moment we reach a compromise on the policy.”
Here is a glossary that could determine the fate of the debate.
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The Wall
It started its rhetorical life at 35 to 40 feet high in early 2016, peaked at 50 feet midcampaign, then fell back to 32 feet in January 2018.
In the beginning, there was a tweet.
At 4:34 p.m. Aug. 5, 2014, Trump sent a message: “SECURE THE BORDER! BUILD THE WALL!”
Trump’s definition of “wall” has been a moving target since.
In the early days of the 2016 campaign, Trump said the wall should be built of “precast concrete” with “no windows, no nothing.” He now says that he always meant that steel and “see-through” materials could work, too, and has, from time to time, mused about festooning the wall with solar panels. In December, he tweeted an image showing a puzzling rendering of a picketed “Steel Slat Barrier.”
Soon after taking office, the president commissioned eight prototypes of wall designs, four made of concrete and the remainder fabricated from steel and other materials. They ranged in height from 18 to 30 feet.
The models were tested last year, and the results were inconclusive, according to leaked documents showing that all of them could be breached with a determined effort and the right tools. But Trump administration officials say that the testing provided them with valuable information, and lessons learned were incorporated into an already built section of slatted 30-foot-high “bollard” fence near Calexico, California.
As Trump’s image of the wall changed, so did its price tag. He now wants $5.7 billion for the wall — but that number has bounced between $4 billion and $20 billion over the past three years. During the shutdown fight, he even suggested that he would accept an unspecified “down payment.”
‘I Would Ask for Wall. We Need Wall.’
Kirstjen Nielsen said this in December before the House Judiciary Committee.
Nielsen, the homeland security secretary, was roundly mocked for dropping the “the” before “wall” — with critics likening it to the “I love lamp” scene from the movie “Anchorman.”
In reality, Nielsen was trying to keep her request as vague as possible to facilitate a compromise, while staying nominally true to Trump’s campaign promise.
“She was lampooned,” Johnson said. “But she was really just trying to introduce the concept that a wall could be almost any kind of a barrier.”
The fact that Nielsen felt compelled to use the “W” word indicated her concern about alienating members of Trump’s base, who roar “build the wall” at his rallies. To that end, members of the president’s team have been quietly removing the word “replacement” from public statements about upgrades to existing border barriers.
They instead insert the word “new,” according to an official familiar with the practice.
Border Security
Democrats have embraced the phrase border security, meant to describe a comprehensive approach that includes improvements in technology, new surveillance programs and increases in Border Patrol staffing.
As part of the failed 2014 “Gang of Eight” effort to overhaul the nation’s immigration system, a coalition of Senate Democrats supported a $46 billion bill to expand the Border Patrol, with improvements to existing fencing. The bill was shot down by House Republicans because it included a process that would have allowed many illegal immigrants to remain in the country.
But the bill now stands as evidence to Trump and congressional Republicans of how Democrats in previous years voted to increase funding for barriers under the broad rubric of border security, when packaged with a path to citizenship.
But Trump’s political weaponization of the wall is now making such a compromise increasingly untenable for Democrats. “We’re not doing a wall,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters this month. “Does anyone have any doubt that we’re not doing a wall?”
The 2020 presidential campaign is making compromise even more difficult. Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., who announced this week that she is running for president, declared the wall “a medieval vanity project,” then vowed to make opposition to it a centerpiece of her campaign.
“The wall concept is an anathema to most Democrats,” said Geoff Garin, a veteran Democratic pollster who works for Priorities USA, a political action committee. “They are more than willing to have a granular conversation about what is common sense and effective border security, but it’s not going to be a conversation about a wall in any sense that Trump has used the word.”
Fencing
A bipartisan deal in 2006 — supported by Hillary Clinton and Obama — included funding for new and reinforced “fencing” along 700 miles of the southern border.
The word “fence” is, for the moment at least, less politically charged than “wall.”
In 2006, a coalition of Republicans and 90 Democrats in the House and the Senate — including Obama and Clinton, then senators — passed President George W. Bush’s plan to add more than 700 new miles of double-layered “reinforced” fencing.
“I am comfortable with barriers that involve vehicles, fences,” Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., told CNN this week.
But what exactly is meant by “fence”? The southern border is already a crazy-quilt of different border barriers of different sizes, different materials, installed in different eras — known, by and large, as fencing.
And they have different uses. Urban chain-link is meant to deter migrants on foot; an array of metal and concrete “vehicle barriers” have been strung in remote areas; and stretches of concertina wire are used to fill in gaps where there are no permanent structures and on top of structures where there are some. There are also dozens of variants — pickets, corrugated panels, berms, X-shaped steel barriers, even planked walls placed along Gulf Coast beaches.
In recent budget bills, Democrats have insisted on a provision limiting the expansion of barriers to “existing” technologies, a move intended to frame any new construction as an old “fence” rather than a new “wall,” according to a senior Democratic congressional aide.
Back in 2006, Pelosi and other congressional liberals voted against the reinforced fencing bill. It is not clear they would support a similar measure even if it were part of a more extensive deal that included a reprieve for the young undocumented immigrants in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, also known as DACA.
Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, was one of those who supported the 2006 bill, and late last year offered Trump a $25 billion deal that included protections for DACA recipients — and left open the possibility of more fencing. Pelosi did not agree to the proposal.
Pedestrian Fencing
The Department of Homeland Security has prioritized a plan to build about 100 miles of new fencing to keep out “pedestrians.”
Trump’s $5.7 billion request would pay for the installation of barriers on another 215 miles of border — in addition to an estimated 654 miles of fencing, much of it in the form of vehicle barriers, currently in place along the 1,900-mile border.
That number would include installation of about 100 miles of barriers to keep out migrants, many from Central America, seeking to enter the country on foot in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas. Before the shutdown, Republican senators, led by John Cornyn of Texas, proposed passing $1.6 billion in funding for 65 miles of that project.
The idea went nowhere at the time. But a handful of congressional Democrats, including Sen. Jon Tester of Montana, did not rule out supporting the plan in the future.
‘Smart’ Wall
Nobody is quite sure what that means.
“The walls we are building are not medieval walls,” Trump said on Jan. 25 during his rambling Rose Garden announcement of the three-week funding deal that ended the 35-day government shutdown.
“These barriers are made of steel, have see-through visibility, which is very important, and are equipped with sensors, monitors and cutting-edge technology, including state-of-the-art drones,” he told reporters.
It seems like an unlikely gateway to compromise, but some Democrats believe the president was signaling his willingness to accept funding for new technologies, beyond steel and concrete.
Two days earlier, Rep. James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, the third-ranking Democrat in the House, told reporters that he would be open to fulfilling Trump’s $5.7 billion request if it were spent on a smart wall, targeted at improving border surveillance, the expanded use of drones and X-ray technology to screen for weapons and drugs, as well as on the hiring of more Border Patrol agents.
Trump, aides said, is open to spending some of the money on similar improvements. His idea of a smart wall was inspired by the one built by Israel on its border with Gaza, which uses high-tech surveillance equipment, including closed-circuit cameras.
Barrier
“You can call it a ‘barrier,’ you can call it whatever you want,” Trump said during a news conference on Jan. 11, adding, “They can name it whatever. They can name it ‘peaches.’ I don’t care what they name it. But we need money for that barrier.”
Trump’s language has softened as the funding fight has intensified, and “barrier” now enjoys pride of place next to “wall.”
“If the committee of Republicans and Democrats now meeting on Border Security is not discussing or contemplating a Wall or Physical Barrier, they are Wasting their time!” he tweeted on Wednesday.
Whether Trump was providing semantic cover for a compromise deal may depend on whether he is disciplined enough to tone down his messaging.
His allies seem eager for him to do so.
“It doesn’t have to be a wall,” Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif. and the minority leader, told reporters on Tuesday. “Physical barriers would be fine.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.