Donald Trump Has No Plan to Secure the Border

What do you do when you’ve fixated on complex issues for nearly a decade but have no idea how to fix them? You put out GOP’s just-released 2024 Platform. Divided into some 20 “chapters”, much of it reflects a Donald Trump “Greatest Hits” retrospective. It is couched in generalizations and bromides – “We are a Nation in Serious Decline” and “We will be a Nation based on Truth, Justice and Common Sense.” Breathtaking in its overall lack of seriousness, it is light on anything resembling actual “policy.”

Nowhere is this clearer than in its half-baked plans for border security. Chapter Two trumpets “Seal the Border and Stop the Migrant Invasion” yet fails to lay out what that means, let alone what actions achieving it would entail. Having spent the bulk of my professional career in port, border and supply chain security including a stint as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense (Drug Enforcement) where I simultaneously served as Deputy Chairman of the federal government’s Border Interdiction Committee, I know operationalizing the GOP platform would be impossible. It barely constitutes a plan.

For instance, one “solution” it proposes is having the suggestion that the U.S. Navy implement a “Fentanyl Blockade” and engage in search and seizure of vessels bound for the U.S. Aside from the obvious practical impossibility of searching, at sea, of a container ship that could be laden with up to 24,000 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) stacked ten high, the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 specifically prohibits the Armed Forces from engaging in domestic law enforcement (like searching for illegal drugs.)

Similarly, and echoing Trump’s prior, evidence-free assertions that the U.S. is being “invaded” by migrants who may also be gang members, drug dealers, cartel members, “jihadists” and “Christian-hating Communists, Marxists and Socialists,” the GOP proposes “moving thousands of Troops (sic.) currently stationed overseas to our own Southern Border.” But it does not lay out what these troops would do.

The platform also never defines what “seal the border” even means. If the platform means that statement literally—i.e., that no people or goods can cross the border—the impact would be economically cataclysmic. In 2023 Mexico was our number one trading partner, accounting for almost $800B in cross border commerce. The port of entry (POE) of Laredo alone accounted for nearly 3 million cargo truck crossings with the Otay Mesa, CA POE (the world’s busiest border crossing) ringing up over 1 million. Literally sealing the border would send painful economic shockwaves around the globe and deep into the American heartland.

It also would do almost nothing to curb the drug problem. It is at land, sea and air ports of entry that illicit cargo is smuggled into the U.S. hidden within the legitimate stream of commerce. Ironically, the GOP is the same party that, at Trump’s behest, shot down the first truly bi-partisan border deal in generations that included significant funding for advanced technology designed to detect hidden contraband.

Of course, the platform calls for completion of Trump’s border wall which it describes as being accomplished “quickly, effectively and inexpensively” with existing sections as working “magnificently.” These assertions are simply false. Estimates for the completion of the wall run anywhere from $12.6B to as much as $70B. Further, the wall is already failing. Existing sections have experienced periodic collapses due to climate and topography and have proven to be readily scalable, even by youngsters and senior citizens. Smuggling organizations have been cutting through, scaling and tunneling under border barriers for generations. They won’t stop now.

The wall, then, is as much a deterrent as a phony burglar alarm sign outside your house. It is not how you protect your family.

If “sealing the border” means halting migrant processing, then the platform’s plan is both illegal and, again, economically devastating. For as much as some people would like to believe otherwise, migrant labor is crucial to vast segments of our economy.  Likewise, a cruel and arbitrary rounding up and deportation of migrants would have an equally disruptive impact on our economy and social constructs.

For nearly ten years, Republican stridency over the chaos at our southern border has been at the very heart of their overall message. Our southern border is, at times, chaotic and something does need to be done about it.  Unfortunately, instead of focusing on the root causes of the migrant crisis and looking at multi-national efforts to reduce conditions that instigate migration, or even produce workable plans to secure the border, the GOP has offered a cynical, hollow platform of talking points.

It is, as they say near the border, all hat and no cattle.

Robert Kelly is the former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Drug Enforcement and former Deputy Chairman of the government’s Border Interdiction Committee.