The politicians obstructing the construction of the wall along our southern border ought to come down to El Paso for President Trump’s rally Monday night and try to tell people here that we should tear down our wall with Juarez.
Democrats in Washington are fighting tooth and nail to stop even one inch of a new wall, insisting that border walls are “ineffective” and “immoral.” Democrat politicians have decided that they know better than our Border Patrol agents, who say physical barriers are necessary for border security, and proclaim that all we need to secure the border is a few new surveillance drones.
So why don’t they just take their reasoning to its logical conclusion and tell us to tear down our wall?
The answer is that they wouldn’t dare because they know full well we’d tell them to get lost. Unlike them, we’ve seen with our own eyes just how effective border walls really are.
El Paso remains one of the safest big cities in America despite being only walking distance from violence-plagued Juarez. In the last decade, our sister city endured the brunt of one of the greatest humanitarian disasters in the history of this continent, the still-simmering Mexican Drug War. Media outlets have called Juarez “the most dangerous place on earth.”
Luckily for us in El Paso, this explosion of violence came at the same time that the 2006 Secure Fence Act was passed. Murder rates in Juarez rose to levels more typical of Middle Eastern warzones than North American cities, and in 2010, as our wall was being completed, Juarez was awash with blood. More than 3,000 people were killed in a city of just over 1.3 million inhabitants.
El Paso, conversely, only had five murders that year. Five.
That number represents a decrease of more than 90 percent from the peak of violence in the early 90’s. While decades of outstanding police work and good public policy were the key to making our city one of the safest in America, the border wall has been crucial for securing that painstaking progress.
The wall allows our Customs and Border Patrol agents to maintain an effective barrier against the horrific violence on our doorstep, which would negate all of our hard-won gains if the criminals responsible for it were allowed to enter our city unimpeded. While Juarez has made progress in recent years, it still remainstragically violent.
No one in their right mind would suggest that El Paso should become more like Juarez, but that’s exactly what would happen if we were to tear down the barrier that allows us to control who is coming into our city from one of the continent’s most violent places, and intercept the drugs that fuel that violence.
Yet, the groups planning to protest the President’s rally Monday night are blithely parroting the Democrats’ position on border security, which essentially demands that we leave America’s entire border as porous as El Paso’s once was before our wall went up.
The President is visiting El Paso because it showcases a perfect example of how a simple construction project has been incredibly effective in making a once-lawless border very secure, with apprehensions for illegal crossings down more than 90 percent. He’s coming here to propose replicating the same proven solution along 234 carefully-selected miles along the border where law enforcement professionals tell us barriers will be most effective.
Tickets are first-come, first-served, so if any obstructionist Democrats feel like coming out here and telling the people of El Paso that walls don’t work, we’ll be happy to set them straight.
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Rick Seeberger was a candidate for Texas Congressional District 16 which represents the majority of El Paso County. Now founder of El Pasoans United, an Initiative standing up for truth; educating El Pasoans; and taking civic action for government accountability, transparency, and fiscal responsibility.
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