That's a lie; Democrats have never supported expanding wall

To The Daily Sun,

Marc Abear wrote regarding Democrats refusing to fund Trump's wall, "Their reason is the president, not the wall. Their opposition is politically motivated. It is an opposition to a specific human being rather than the wall itself."

Nonsense. If he gets something correct, he deserves credit, such as the Criminal Justice Reform bill he signed but he errs on just about everything. He is a one-page guy who doesn't like to read and hasn't a clue about much. Congress and Trump could easily pass an infrastructure bill which I would give him credit for. I would counter Mr. Abear's ludicrous claim and say that the evidence actually supports the notion that Trumpsters will support anything he wants even if it's drop-dead-dumb. Border experts say a continuous wall is not needed. Urban areas, of course, but we already have them.

Counter-terrorism experts say a wall makes little sense. Even Trumps own government's experts say he is way overstating the problems. Regarding drugs, most heroin, meth, and cocaine comes through legal ports of entry because of the amounts needed to smuggle for cost-effective operations. Fentanyl and synthetic marijuana come mostly from China and also come through legal ports of entry. Most drugs are packed in compartments of cargo and vehicles. And since marijuana is grown in such large quantities and high potency within our borders, marijuana is no longer a big moneymaker. A brick of heroin is worth thousands of times more than a brick of weed. The days of Columbian Gold and Panama Red are over.

All the hysteria about any undocumented worker committing crimes is phony because these same people care about guns more than people. Americans kill 10,000 Americans a year and there is the sound of crickets from the right. As Business Insider states in an article titled "Mollie Tibbetts' death is being used to push debunked ideas about illegal immigration and violent crime," "multiple studies using federal and state data have found no suggestion that rising immigration rates leads to more violent crime." It also notes a study "by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, which further rejects the idea that illegal immigration is tied to increases in rates of violent crime." The CATO study also "found that native-born residents were most likely to commit and be convicted of crimes, while unauthorized immigrants saw a conviction rate that was about 50 percent lower. Legal immigrants appeared to be the most law-abiding, with 86 percent fewer convictions than native-born Texans. You can see the article and CATO's crime chart at (https://www.businessinsider.com/undocumented-aliens-violent-crime-murder-statistics-data-2018-8).

Mr. Abear also wrote, "The opposition is on record as supporting a border wall in the past." More nonsense. The Secure Fence Act of 2006, which he speaks of, authorized no money for any wall. From the White House webpage on that Act, it "Authorizes the construction of hundreds of miles of additional fencing along our Southern border; authorizes more vehicle barriers, checkpoints, and lighting to help prevent people from entering our country illegally; authorizes the Department of Homeland Security to increase the use of advanced technology like cameras, satellites, and unmanned aerial vehicles to reinforce our infrastructure at the border."

This law that Democrats signed on to in 2006 is nearly identical to what experts and Democrats presently support. Democrats did not support a wall in 2006. Marc Abear gets four Pinocchios! Pants on Fire! And did you see Trump's latest offer to get his wall money? How ridiculous!

James Veverka

Tilton