Just a day after retreating from his threat to shut down the entire border with Mexico, Trump accepted a plaque from border agents and sheriffs in front of a 30-foot-tall section of border wall — the physical embodiment of his immigration agenda — and met with border officials, lawmakers and administration officials at the Border Patrol station.
“We’re really making progress at letting people know this is an emergency,” the president said. “It’s a colossal surge and it’s overwhelming our immigration system and we can’t let that happen.”
Critics argue that the wall is not a solution to the surge of families that have arrived in recent months, since most of the families are not trying to sneak into the country undetected. On the contrary, most are seeking Border Patrol agents to turn themselves in, either at the ports of entry or between them.
Asked Thursday night why the president was not using the national emergency he recently declared to seek funds to provide humanitarian relief to the families who have been apprehended recently, Kirstjen Nielsen, the secretary of homeland security, conceded that the focus on the wall is, partly, a stunt.
“Well, I think part of that is just a — it’s an optic,” she told Chris Cuomo, the host of “Cuomo Prime Time” on CNN. “To have the president stand in front of the wall indicates immediately to any viewer that he’s at the border. But I think his message will be about the dual crisis and how we need Congress to act, to give us the authorities to address.”
Trump, however, hailed what he called the “tremendous impact” of the wall in Calexico and said that his administration expected to build 400 miles’ worth of wall in the next two years.
In fact, the small section of wall that Trump stood in front of is not evidence that the president is building the wall he repeatedly called for during his 2016 presidential campaign but merely an upgrade to an existing section of fencing. The 2-mile section was completed in October.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.