Why will Democrats not vote for a wall? Republicans are unable to pin down what they want out of a border security deal
California Democrat Rep. Ro Khanna says that Democrats want to do border security in a thoughtful way.
With their latest talking points, the Democrats are proving once again that they know nothing about how immigration enforcement works on our southern border.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and other House Democrats turned to the airwaves last week to argue that instead of a border wall, we could simply use more drones to fix our broken immigration system. Supposedly, modern technology can get the job done.
That only shows that they know as little about drones as they do about border security.
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As someone who’s hunted terrorists in the Middle East using drones, I know what they can and can’t do.
For starters, my teammates and I would use at least two or three drones to track just one terrorist. Drones are meant to be surgical – they’re completely unsuited for the task of watching all of the nearly 2,000 illegal immigrants who try to penetrate our borders every day.
The truth is that you could deploy every drone in the U.S. government's arsenal along the border, and it still wouldn't be enough to solve the problem.
Unless Democrats want to put Hellfire missiles on the drones to prevent people from breaching our borders – and no one wants that – drones are nothing more than multi-million dollar “eyes in the sky.”
Yes, drones can provide more intelligence to our agents on the ground, but that’s not particularly useful if there isn’t enough manpower on the ground to stop illegal immigrants once they’ve been identified. Drones are not substitutes for more agents and an actual barrier at the border.
In fact, immigration enforcement agencies such as U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) have been using drones on the southern border for years, but their limited utility has not come close to justifying the massive operating cost.
Border agents simply can't use drones along the border in the same way that my fellow soldiers and I did when hunting terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan. Whereas we were able to use drones to eliminate threats, border patrol agents can only use them to determine where to allocate their already-overextended resources.
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We need a physical barrier on the southern border, not a virtual one. While House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her fellow Democrats continue to fantasize about technology that doesn’t yet exist, thousands of illegal aliens are pouring across our border every day. Drones can monitor those people, but they can’t stop them from entering our country.
To achieve true border security, what we really need are more boots on the ground, backed up by a wall to slow down the illegal immigrants and give our agents a chance to respond.
The Democrats either can’t understand or won’t accept that basic reality, and they’re compounding that error by placing their faith in a solution that the experts already know to be completely ineffective.
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