Trump and Harris both tout border wall in campaigns. Will a wall solve the ‘border crisis’?

Vice President Kamala Harris has now embraced the symbol of former President Donald Trump’s border policy: the wall.
Sections of the imposing 30-foot steel fence constructed during the Trump presidency appeared multiple times in an ad released on Aug. 7 declaring Harris “tough” on border control.
In her speech accepting the Democratic nomination for president last week, Harris said her administration would support policies to “secure our border,” including recent border legislation that would have allocated $650 million for further border wall construction.
This is just one of several policy “flip-flops” Harris has made during her bid for the White House. During her 2020 campaign for president, Harris called the wall a “medieval vanity project” and said she would “not vote for a wall under any circumstances.”
Construction of a border wall — which was ultimately paid for by taxpayers, not Mexico, to the tune of over $20 million per mile — was a key element of Trump’s 2016 campaign and his presidential administration.
Trump continued to emphasize the importance of finishing the wall during a press conference on the border in Cochise County, Arizona, last Thursday, and used it as a way to contrast his border policy from that of Harris — despite her recent change of tone.
“We had it solved,” Trump said. “Then Kamala came in and dismantled every single Trump border policy and halted all wall construction, and there it sits.”
Trump spoke to reporters against the backdrop of an unfinished portion of rust-colored border wall, mostly constructed under former President George W. Bush, on one side, and heaps of unassembled bollard fencing, purchased during the Trump administration, on the other.
Trump said he had built “500 miles” of border wall, with the “final gaps” about to be sealed when the Biden-Harris administration entered office. One of President Joe Biden’s first acts as president was to halt construction of the border wall, even though much of the material had already been purchased.
“You can see on the ground behind me the sections of wall that taxpayers paid for, a lot of money, but Kamala refused to put it up,” Trump said. “That was when I first realized that they want open borders.”
During his first term, Trump redirected more than $10 billion from the Defense Department budget, in addition to the $5 billion appropriated by Congress in 2019, to build more than 700 miles of “new border wall system.” Trump ultimately oversaw the completion of 458 miles of border wall.
Most of the wall was constructed to replace preexisting smaller barriers, or to serve as “secondary border walls,” providing two layers of fencing to help Border Patrol agents catch migrants in between barriers. The vast majority of border barriers — around 500 miles — were constructed under Bush. Another 100 miles or so were finished under former President Barack Obama.
While only 52 miles of new “primary” border wall was constructed under Trump where there had been no barriers before, the 30-foot bollard fencing Trump installed represented a much more formidable barrier compared to much of the “Normandy barriers” that it replaced.
There is currently 354 miles of 18-30-foot “pedestrian barriers,” and 300 miles of shorter “vehicle barriers” along the United States’ 2,000-mile long border with Mexico, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Border Patrol union leader Paul A. Perez and former president of the National Border Patrol Council Brandon Judd joined Trump at the border to praise his priority of completing the border wall. They said Trump had listened to Border Patrol agents like them when he was in office to know what kind of wall, and in what locations, would help to secure the border.
“That’s why that wall is successful,” Judd said. “He listened to the men and women that were on the front lines on exactly what needed to be on that wall.”
Trump touted his wall, complete with “anti-climb” panels, as the “Rolls Royce of walls.” He said the rebar-reinforced concrete inside, and beneath, made it difficult to cut through or dig under, and that fittings for wires made the fence easy to set up with surveillance equipment. Migrants and human smugglers have been seen sawing off portions of the new wall, and climbing over the fence, and falling off of it.
Judd, as well as Cochise County Sheriff Mark Dannels, said a wall is an important “slice of a pie” when it comes to enforcing the law along the border. Donald Huish, the mayor of Douglas, a border town near where Trump gave his press conference, said the border wall constructed under Trump and Bush increased his town’s sense of security by pushing migrants trying to enter the country further away from population centers to where there were gaps in the wall.
But data from recent years seems to suggest that border walls do little to prevent border crossings or to disincentivize migrants from making the journey from their home countries, according to Jennie Murray, the president and CEO of National Immigration Forum, a nonprofit organization that promotes “responsible federal immigration policies.”
“We’ve only had more and more wall and yet the volume (of immigration) increases, and that’s because of the horrific push factors and the millions of people that are displaced right now,” Murray said.
Since Biden was sworn in as president, there have been at least 8.3 million border encounters between immigrants entering the country and Border Patrol agents, according to CBP data. This does not include the estimated 1.6 million “gotaways” who evaded border law enforcement during the Biden administration.
Border crossings reached an all-time high in December, with more than 300,000 encounters along the southwestern border. In July, the number of border encounters fell to the lowest number since the first two months of Biden’s presidency, at 104,00, following new executive orders restricting asylum claims.
However, even if the wall covered every inch of the southern border, which would be difficult considering how much of it is mountainous or in a river, migrants, and the powerful cartels that smuggle them, would still find ways to enter the country and claim asylum, Murray said.
While Border Patrol agents have told Murray that physical barriers do help them to apprehend more migrants with their limited staff and technology, barriers do not stem the flow of migrants, she said. The “border crisis” is just a symptom of an “outdated immigration system that we need to overhaul,” Murray said.
A Monmouth University poll released earlier this year found that 53% of Americans supported building a border wall. This was the first time this pollster found majority support for the border wall since it began asking the question in 2015.
Since 2015 — the year Trump launched his first primary campaign for president — the former president’s position on the border wall has become 13 percentage points more popular among Republicans, 11 points more popular among independents and 14 points less popular among Democrats, the poll found.