THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 19 , 2019. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A
BY PHILIP RUCKER,
NICK MIROFF
AND DAVID NAKAMURAsan diego — President Trump
on Wednesday toured a border
barrier here along the U.S.-Mexi-
co divide while his top aides
conducted a Coast Guard flyover
of the double-layered, steel fenc-
ing — part of a show of force
ahead of the 2020 election aimed
reducing a massive spike in unau-
thorized immigration.
Trump’s visit to the Otay Mesa
area of this border town near
Tijuana comes as the administra-
tion has felt emboldened after
winning new legal authority to
move forward in funding a border
wall and, at least temporarily,
gaining additional powers to en-
force restrictions on asylum that
could help blunt a record surge of
Central American families.
Capping a three-day road trip
that included a campaign rally in
New Mexico and several cam-
paign fundraisers in California,
Trump touted his team’s progress
in completing a 24-mile section of
replacement barrier here.
“People are hearing about the
wall and they’re not coming up
nearly as much,” Trump told re-
porters while standing near the
30-foot steel bollard fencing,
which he called the “Rolls-Royce”
of border walls.
“People see this — it’s one of the
reasons I’m doing this — and they
think, ‘There’s no reason to make
that long journey up because
we’re not getting into the United
States,’ ” Trump added.
As the president ramps up his
reelection bid, his reliance on
hard-line immigration tactics
represents an uncertain bet that
deterrence will persuade mi-
grants to stay away. Past trends,
however, suggest that ebbs in
migration patterns will be diffi-
cult to sustain in the face of
ongoing violence and poverty in
Central America.
Though the number of arrests
at the southern border has
plunged nearly 60 percent since a
12-year high in the spring, experts
said the progress has been built
on potentially unreliable tools
that could prove temporary —
including increased cooperation
from the governments in Mexico
and Guatemala and court rulings.
“The administration is reach-
ing for every lever they can...
and some of those are having
significant gains,” said David In-
serra, a policy analyst at the
conservative Heritage Founda-
tion. “But the reality is that the
measures Trump is entertaining
are mostly executive agreements
and [court] decisions on regula-
tions. All of them can be undone
or undermined by new court
hearings or decisions elsewhere.”
Trump and his advisers view
the immigration efforts as a polit-
ical winner, and the president
touted his policies during a cam-
paign rally in Rio Rancho, N.M.,
in a heavily Latino state that leans
Democratic. Polls show broad dis-
approval from Democrats over
Trump’s handling of immigra-
tion, while large majorities of
Republican voters support his
approach.
As the presidential entourage
arrived here, Trump posted an
image on Twitter with his face
superimposed in front of a bol-
lard wall and the message, in
Spanish, “No Más,” meaning “no
more.”
Trump’s critics have faulted
him for trampling over long-
standing U.S. asylum policies
aimed at offering relief to vulner-
able migrants fleeing persecution
in their homelands.
The administration has forced
at least 42,000 migrants, most ofthem from Central America, to
remain in makeshift conditions
in Mexican border towns as their
asylum cases are litigated under a
program called the Migrant Pro-
tection Protocols, or MPP. And a
ruling last week from the Su-
preme Court permits federal offi-
cials to enforce new regulations
to deny asylum to those migrants
as a legal fight over the rules plays
out in court.
Immigrant rights advocates
have accused Trump of employ-
ing draconian tactics to respond
to a problem of his own making.
The number of migrants taken
into U.S. custody at the southern
border peaked in May at more
than 144,000 — the highest
monthly total in a dozen years.
Experts cited a rush to cross the
border as Trump unsuccessfully
pursued other hard-line mea-
sures, such as a policy that result-
ed in the separation of thousands
of migrant children from their
families.
Though migration numbers
traditionally dip in the hot sum-
mer months, federal officials have
credited the significant decline inborder crossings since May to the
MPP program, as well as a crack-
down from the Mexican govern-
ment, which under threats of new
tariffs from Trump dispatched
thousands of National Guard
troops to its northern and south-
ern borders.
“They’re certainly showing us
that they are doing all they can to
take credit and message that the
actions they’ve been taking are
bearing fruit,” said Doris Meiss-
ner, a senior fellow at the Migra-
tion Policy Institute who served
as at top immigration official in
the Clinton administration.
“Is it a durable solution? That’s
another issue,” Meissner added.
“Everything we know about mi-
gration and the way migration
works is that when you have
strong push forces and when you
have strong pull forces, things
may be interrupted for a while,
but then there’s adaptation” f rom
migrants and smuggling net-
works.
Trump aides defended their
tactics as a justifiable emergency
reaction to the humanitarian cri-
sis in the spring.Administration officials have
faulted Congress for failing to
pass a comprehensive immigra-
tion policy overhaul and pointed
to the fast-growing number of
asylum applications in recent
years as evidence that Central
American families are abusing
lax U.S. policies. Most migrants
who apply for asylum are released
into the country while awaiting
their court hearings, which can
take months because of lengthy
backlogs.
In addition to the new asylum
restrictions, the Trump adminis-
tration has reached an agreement
with Guatemala that could com-
pel migrants from El Salvador
and Honduras who are seeking
entrance to the United States to
apply instead for asylum in that
country.
The cumulative effect of their
efforts, officials said, is to con-
struct an obstacle course of physi-
cal, legal and bureaucratic hur-
dles that will drive down unau-
thorized immigration.
Trump administration officials
have said they expect to complete
more than 450 miles of replace-
ment and new border barriers by
the end of 2020, but only a small
fraction of that has been complet-
ed to date. The president also has
failed to deliver on promises to
get Mexico to pay the billions of
dollars it is expected to cost,
instead using emergency powers
to tap into money that was allo-
cated to Pentagon projects.
The Pentagon has compiled a
list of projects overseas that will
be eliminated due to the shift of
dollars, and military officials
have warned privately that the
moves could put personnel at
risk.
The Interior Department an-
nounced Wednesday it was trans-
ferring administrative jurisdic-
tion of approximately 560 acres of
federal land to the Army to build
roughly 70 miles of border barri-
ers.
On Tuesday, acting homelandsecurity secretary Kevin McA-
leenan and several of his senior
aides visited a makeshift court-
house in the border town of Lare-
do, Te x., established under the
MPP program to expedite asylum
hearings, the first of five planned
facilities that could cost up to
$155 million. And on Wednesday,
the group conducted an aerial
tour of the border fence here.
“There’s a false narrative out
there that this is the president’s
vanity wall,” said Mark Morgan,
acting commissioner of Customs
and Border Protection. “That’s
false. He reacted out to experts
and agents on the front lines.”
Immigration experts warned
that Trump is at risk of prema-
turely declaring victory.
In July, the Trump administra-
tion cut millions of dollars in aid
to Guatemala, Honduras and El
Salvador, where most of the mi-
grant families are coming from, a
move experts said could depress
efforts in those countries to im-
prove economic and security con-
ditions.
Furthermore, Trump’s threats
of tariffs to force Mexico to crack
down on migrants have engen-
dered widespread political oppo-
sition in that country, said Alan
Bersin, who served as CBP com-
missioner in the Obama adminis-
tration. He added that Mexico’s
deteriorating economy could pro-
pel more migrants from that
country to try to cross the border,
even if the number of Central
Americans continues to drop.
But Trump was enthusiastic
during his tour. When a construc-
tion worker suggested the presi-
dent join the team in signing
their names on the steel bollard
fencing, the president didn’t h esi-
tate.
“I’ll sign it,” he said. “Let’s go.”
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]Nakamura reported from
Washington.Trump’s border barrier visit caps campaign-centered trip
BY AARON GREGG
AND ERICA WERNERThe Pentagon warned of dire
outcomes unless Congress paid
for urgently needed military con-
struction projects nationwide —
the same projects that have now
been canceled to fund President
Trump’s border wall.
The warnings are contained in
Defense Department budget re-
quests sent to lawmakers in re-
cent years. They include poten-
tially hazardous living conditions
for troops and their families, as
well as unsafe schools that would
impede learning. In numerous
cases, the Defense Department
warned that lives would be put at
risk if buildings don’t meet the
military’s standards for fire safety
or management of explosives.
Even before $3.6 billion in con-
struction funding was pulled to
support a wall along the U.S.-
Mexico border, military buildings
across the country often had been
neglected in favor of other priori-
ties. The defense spending limits
that took effect after a 2013 budg-
et deal designed to end a govern-
ment shutdown starved the mili-
tary’s construction budget for
years, officials and analysts say,
meaning many construction proj-
ects are long overdue.
The details in the budget docu-
ments — annual requests the Pen-
tagon sends to Capitol Hill that
are mostly public — underscore
the risky trade-offs Trump made
in declaring a national emergen-
cy that allowed him to divert
funding for the wall.
A Pentagon spokesman did not
immediately respond to a mes-
sage seeking comment.
In requests to Congress over
the past three years, military offi-
cials describe dilapidated World
War II-era warehouses with
“leaking asbestos panel roof sys-
tems,” a drone pilot training facil-
ity with sinkholes and a bat infes-
tation, explosives being stored in
buildings that didn’t meet safety
standards and a mold-infested
middle school. In numerous in-
stances, Defense Department of-
ficials wrote that the infrastruc-
ture problems were hurting the
military’s readiness and imped-
ing the department’s national se-
curity mission.
Democrats and some Republi-
cans strongly oppose the emer-
gency declaration. The Senate is
expected to vote for a second time
in the coming weeks to overturn
it, but Congress does not appear
to have enough votes to overcome
Trump’s veto of such a disapprov-
al resolution.
A list of the military construc-
tion projects being defunded to
pay for the wall was released in
early September. But it did not
contain details of the Pentagon’s
explanations to Congress about
why the projects were needed —
and what would happen if they
were not completed. The Wash-
ington Post’s r eview of the budget
documents is the first attempt to
detail those Pentagon warnings.
The Post uncovered budget
documents pertaining to 29 of the
43 military construction projects
in the mainland United States —
not including those in territories
such as Puerto Rico and Guam —
that are being canceled to pay for
the wall. The review excluded two
projects that had been canceled
before the emergency authoriza-
tion. Many of these documents
are publicly available but have
not been previously reported.
The Pentagon insists that the
projects are merely being de-
layed, not canceled, and Republi-
cans say they will try to “backfill”
the money in question, but Demo-
crats oppose that strategy. In re-
cent days, the fight over the bor-
der wall money has caused angry
divisions among lawmakers try-
ing to write annual spending bills
to keep the government running,
raising the specter of another
shutdown this year.
Congressional Democrats have
rallied around the issue, decrying
unsafe conditions in their home
districts and nationwide.
“We see across the country —communities, military bases and
people in the military — saying,
‘Taking away this money hurts
us,’ ” Minority Leader Charles E.
Schumer (N.Y.) said on the Senate
floor this week. “A ll the Demo-
crats are asking for is to protect
the troops from having their re-
sources robbed for a border wall
— resources that Congress said
should go to the military.”Ominous warnings
This month, the Pentagon an-
nounced that 127 military con-
struction projects stood to lose
funding to pay for Trump’s wall.
Although Pentagon officials have
expressed confidence that the
projects ultimately will go for-
ward, there is no guarantee that
they will.
In many cases, the Pentagon
has been ominous in describing
the potential outcomes should
the projects not happen.
The Air Force has been seeking
a new training facility for drone
pilots at Holloman Air Force Base
in New Mexico because the cur-
rent training facility had sink-
holes and a bat infestation.
It also prevents pilot trainees
from operating in a classified en-
vironment, the Air Force wrote in
its publicly accessible budget re-
quest. This means trainees could
not use a safety system designedto alert drone pilots to the loca-
tion of ground-based personnel,
as well as a separate system de-
signed to prevent aircraft from
crashing into one another.
The Air Force has been seeking
a new control center at Hill Air
Force Base in Utah, designed to
replace a pair of “dilapidated
WWII-era warehouses” used for
air traffic control and mission
control operations even though
they have been labeled “structur-
ally deficient” and don’t meet
regulations. The Air Force noted
in its budget request that air
traffic control equipment is at
risk of being destroyed by “roof
leaks from failing asbestos panel
roof systems.”
If the $28 million project is not
finished, the Air Force warned in
2017, service members will con-
tinue to operate in “aging dilapi-
dated buildings that were never
intended for the purpose they are
now serving.”
The Air National Guard has
been seeking to replace the air-
craft parking ramp at a New Or-
leans facility, w hich abuts a public
roadway. This means munitions-
loaded aircraft — which are kept
on alert so they can be scrambled
quickly in the event of a terrorist
attack — expose the public to the
“unacceptable risk” of being af-
fected by an explosive accident,the Air Force wrote in 2018. An
Air Force analysis calculated that
members of the public are inside
the jets’ “explosive arc” for about
3,800 hours per year as they pass
by the base.
In addition, the shelters that
hold the aircraft when they aren’t
parked on the runway are on
concrete slabs that are sinking,
causing pipes and electrical con-
nections to pull loose. The shel-
ters also did not have fire protec-
tions, the Defense Department
wrote in 2018.
Unless $15 million is allocated
to revamp the base, military offi-
cials wrote, U.S. service members
working there “are at risk from
explosions and fires.”
Several of the defunded proj-
ects were supposed to replace
unsafe buildings used to hold
heavy munitions and military ve-
hicles, the Defense Department
said.
Service members at an ammu-
nition plant in Indiana often have
worked in violation of the Army’s
safety standards for the handling
of explosives because the storage
facilities don’t meet the military’s
needs, the Army wrote last year.
The $16 million project would
give the base more room to store
munitions at its rail holding area.
The Air Force has been seeking
$41 million to repair a centralheat power plant boiler at E ielson
Air Force Base in Alaska. The Air
Force warned in its budget j ustifi-
cation to Congress that the boiler,
installed in 1951, is expected to
fail within the next several years
at a base where winter tempera-
tures can plunge as low as 65 de-
grees below zero. That outcome
“would be devastating to facilities
and the missions housed in those
facilities,” t he Air Force said. The
base could be forced to evacuate,
and the facilities would then
freeze and require “many mil-
lions of dollars” to make them
usable again.
The system in question is one
of two 1950s-era boilers that re-
quire urgent replacement at Eiel-
son. The failure of the other one is
described as “imminent” a nd also
could force an evacuation, fol-
lowed by a deep freeze that would
cost millions of dollars to recover
from, according to the Air Force’s
description from 2017.‘Compromised readiness’
A different issue looms at
Camp Lejeune, N.C., where medi-
cal and dental care is provided in
“substandard, inefficient, decen-
tralized and uncontrolled facili-
ties,” according to the military,
which has sought congressional
approval to build a new ambula-
tory care center on the base. Not
doing so “will result in compro-
mised readiness, uncoordinated
care delivery, and inappropriate
use of medical resources,” the
Pentagon said.
In another example, the mili-
tary is seeking to repair a middle
school at Fort Campbell in Ken-
tucky, a project that has been
championed by Senate Majority
Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.)
and that he has vowed to protect
even after its appearance on the
list of installations at r isk of being
canceled to pay for Trump’s wall.
The Pentagon described condi-
tions at the middle school as
“substandard” and told lawmak-
ers in requesting $62.6 million to
repair it that “the continued use
of deficient, inadequate, and un-
dersized facilities that do not ac-
commodate the current student
population will continue to im-
pair the overall education pro-
gram for students.”
At Joint Base Andrews in Mary-
land, meanwhile, construction of
a much-needed new child-care
center has been put on hold in
favor of Trump’s wall. The up-
graded facility is supposed to ac-
commodate 165 children and staff
members. As of February 2018,
115 children were on a waiting list
to get in.
[email protected]
[email protected] More at washingtonpost.com/
businessPentagon has made dire warnings if projects canceled for wall don’t happen
CAROLYN VAN HOUTEN/THE WASHINGTON POST
Workers prepare for a secondary border fence in San Diego in August. Billions in military funding is to be diverted to a U.S.-Mexico wall.EVAN VUCCI/ASSOCIATED PRESS
President Trump tours a section of fencing at the U.S.-Mexico
border Wednesday, part of a trip to New Mexico and California.President credits policies
with deterring migrants,
but effect may not lastUPLOADED BY "What's News" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws