As former Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano pointed out, if you build a 50-foot wall, you’ll soon be confronted with a 51-foot ladder.
ALAN BERSINAnd they seek out Border Patrol agents or Customs and Border Protection officials to surrender to them and request political asylum.
More Alan Bersin Quotes
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The National Targeting Center in Virginia run by Customs and Border Protection checks the background of every traveler who seeks to enter the country.
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America should be working more with the Mexicans to prevent the flow of guns going south into Mexico that have fueled so much of the violence there.
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Homeland security is inherently transnational today. There’s hardly anything adverse that happens in our homeland that doesn’t have a cause or effect that’s generated abroad. Increasingly.
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As a result of the U.S.-Mexico War in the 19th century, and the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, half of what was Mexico was severed and became much of the western part of the United States.
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In the last generation we’ve moved past a U.S.-Mexico relationship that while friendly on the surface, and demilitarized for the most part, really was not a genuinely cooperative relationship.
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I think there’s no question that the barriers, the fences and in certain urban areas, the walls, have had an important effect in terms of increasing the manageability and the security of the border.
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Cross-border trade is part of a single production process, and while apparently the Trump administration will seek to re-examine elements of that production platform, it is what it is and won’t be easily dismantled.
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Migrants come up and no longer seek to evade the Border Patrol, but are actually left at the border by their smugglers.
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Mexico now has the 13th largest economy in the world.
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And there are places on the border, such as the Arizona desert or the open terrain around the Big Bend in South Texas, where Mother Nature has created her own barrier that is not easily passable. Or if you do pass through it, you are easily detected.
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We should be wary, particularly with our closest friends and allies, of breaking down the trust and confidence that lie at the foundation of relationships.
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And the smuggling of cash and the money laundering that transnational criminal organizations have instituted in North America, including in the United States.
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We have to remember that information sharing is restricted by legal barriers and cultural barriers and by the notion that information is power and therefore should be hoarded so if you share information you can extract something in exchange.
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The idea was to restore the rule of law, to bring order to a chaotic situation.
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But in fact as Secretary of Homeland Security General John Kelly acknowledged at his confirmation hearing, walls and barriers alone are insufficient to insure security.
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