Bigger border fence is needed
“The aliens gathered by an imaginary line between two cities, two countries, two economies, and when the sun was about to set they moved.
“In the old Border Patrol days a few dozen might try it on a given night. Now, in a zone of few square miles, in effect a no man’s land between the cities of Tijuana, Mexico, and San Diego, USA, they came. Sometimes 10,000 per week.
“And in those canyons lurked Tijuana bandits and cutthroats who fed off the pollos as they crossed the frontier in the night. … Aliens were ambushed, robbed, raped, murdered, occasionally within screaming distance of United States officers at the land port of entry.”
That was a true-to-life horror story at the U.S.-Mexico border two decades ago, as the celebrated author Joseph Wambaugh documented in his 1984 bestseller, “Lines and Shadows” (Bantam).
And it continued unabated until 1994, when Operation Gatekeeper was launched.
That campaign to bring law and order to the Tijuana-San Diego border entailed the construction of solid steel fencing as well as stadium-style lighting along a 14-mile corridor, from the mountains to the Pacific Ocean.
Since the border fence was completed, the number of illegal aliens apprehended along that 14-mile stretch — which, during the 1980s and early 1990s accounted for fully half of unlawful entries into the United States from Mexico — has fallen more than 80 percent. The ambushes and robberies and rapes and murders that were nightly occurrences in the lawless no man’s land of which Wambaugh wrote were reduced nearly to nil.
Most of those trying to steal into the United States were Mexican. But more than a few hailed from countries of concern, including Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Pakistan.
That’s why it is so vital to national security that the Border Patrol complete a project to triple the fencing along the 14-mile corridor, to further fortify the U.S.-Mexico border against foreign infiltrators who mean this nation harm.
The agency, which was folded into the Department of Homeland Security following the Sept. 11 terror attacks, has finished much of the $58 million border security project.
But the California Coastal Commission, beholden to environmental activist groups that couldn’t care less about national security, has rejected the Border Patrol’s plan to complete the project’s final 3.5 miles.
That’s why San Diego Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-El Cajon, and chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, who played an instrumental role in getting the original border security fence built, has taken on the Coastal Commission. He has written to Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge urging him to exercise his federal authority to overrule the “obstructionist” state agency.
“If you build the fence, you save the ecosystem,” Hunter said. Not to mention the environmental benefits to be gained by the Border Patrol’s plan to restore vegetation to 85 miles of dirt roads — 185 acres worth — to mitigate the environmental impact of completing the triple border fence.
If the Coastal Commission had its way, there probably wouldn’t be even a single border fence, much less the three necessary to fortify border security.
The westernmost stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border today would be pretty much the way Wambaugh described it two decades ago. Except that the no man’s land between the two countries would provide easy passage into the United States not only to illegal aliens and drug smugglers, but also to terrorists.
(Joseph Perkins is a columnist for The San Diego Union-Tribune and can be reached at [email protected].)