OPINION:
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, trailing Donald Trump in GOP presidential primary polls by double digits, turned up the heat over the weekend, taking aim at the former president and his record.
Mr. Trump “promised to have Mexico pay for a border wall. They did, like 50 miles of wall. There’s massive [open] expanses still there,” Mr. DeSantis told Fox News’ “MediaBuzz” on Sunday.
The problem with Mr. DeSantis‘ jab? For starters, it’s inaccurate. Then there’s the reality that Mr. DeSantis has no record of having built even 1 mile of a border wall, so who is to say he can “deliver results”?
And last, the wall is one of Mr. Trump’s signature policy items. Attacking Mr. Trump on his own campaign promise and then trying to claim it for oneself seems catty and desperate.
Five days before Mr. Trump left office, nearly 740 miles of border wall had been fully funded, and more than 660 miles were already built or under construction, according to Customs and Border Protection figures.
“After more than two years of litigation and Democrat obstruction, the wall was going up at an average rate of two miles per day,” Mr. Trump wrote in our pages in 2021 after leaving office. “We had already more than doubled the length of the physical barrier protecting our southern border. We had also replaced much of the previously existing dilapidated fencing with new impenetrable metal beams, focusing on the highest traffic areas that border patrol agents themselves had identified.”
Yes, it was hard going.
When Mr. Trump took office in 2017, he requested $1.6 billion from Congress to begin wall construction and was stymied by Republican lawmakers. In September 2017, USA Today found that just 69 of the 292 Republicans in Congress said they supported Mr. Trump’s border wall funding request.
Mr. DeSantis was one of the holdouts. While in the House, Mr. DeSantis voted against wall funding for fiscal 2018 when Mr. Trump requested the border appropriations.
In late 2018, Mr. Trump asked Congress for $5.7 billion to build the wall — which he was again denied — leading to a partial government shutdown. Mr. Trump eventually got $1.4 billion — not for the new wall prototypes he was reviewing, but for 55 miles of bollard fencing.
Frustrated but not defeated, Mr. Trump in 2019 declared a national emergency to gain access to about $8 billion to fund the border wall, using money already allocated to the departments of Defense and Treasury.
The move was blocked in court on the basis that the funds weren’t specifically authorized by Congress to be used on border wall contracts. The case made its way to the Supreme Court, where the five conservative justices overruled the lower court, allowing the money to be transferred and the construction of the wall — finally — to begin.
And did Mexico pay for it?
In the summer of 2019, after a surge in illegal immigration from Mexico, Mr. Trump announced plans to impose tariffs on all Mexican goods coming into the country despite the existing free-trade agreement. Republican leaders in Congress decried the move as economic suicide and threatened to block the tariffs.
Nine days after Mr. Trump leveled the threat, Mexico agreed to “take unprecedented steps to increase enforcement to curb irregular migration,” according to a joint U.S.-Mexican statement, including the deployment of its National Guard throughout the country.
Mexico also agreed to take in more migrants from third countries — and provide health, education, and employment opportunities to them — as they waited for their asylum claims to be heard in the U.S.
So yes, Mexico did pay — with its own increased immigration enforcement.
And it worked.
Other than in 2019 — illegal immigration was at all-time lows during the Trump administration. It was only in 2021 — when President Biden took office and dismantled all of Mr. Trump’s immigration policies, including halting the pending construction of more than 300 miles of border wall — that the U.S. saw a rapid surge in illegal immigration.
Through Mr. Trump’s four years in office, there were 1.95 million illegal crossings. In Mr. Biden’s first two years, there have been 4.1 million.
It’s estimated the Biden administration is wasting at least $3 million a day by not finishing Mr. Trump’s border wall. As reported by the Washington Examiner this month, fourth-generation cattle rancher Russell Johnson has “countless steel beams” sitting on his New Mexico property, just waiting to be constructed. He has a nearly mile-long hole in Mr. Trump’s border wall that has never been built.
“I’d much rather see this going in gaps than just sitting out here,” Mr. Johnson told the Examiner, complaining that his land has become the federal government’s “warehouse” for materials from canceled wall projects that have already been paid for by American taxpayers.
Mr. Johnson said no one in the Biden administration has told him what they are going to do with the materials or how they are going to get them off his land.
“It just doesn’t sit well with me that this is taxpayer money just sitting out here and rusting away in the New Mexico desert,” Mr. Johnson told the Examiner.
“This is brand-new metal. It’s already been fabricated and stuff, ready to be installed in the border wall, but the government, rather than putting it in and installing it like it was intended to be, they’re going to sell it for scrap, which is going to … make this worth pennies on the dollar compared to what it could have been,” he said.
So, sorry, Mr. DeSantis. Your claims of building a wall ring hollow. Tell us how you’re going to persuade Congress to build that wall, how you are going to negotiate with Mexico to increase border enforcement, and why you denied Mr. Trump the funding when he needed it most.
It should be easy on Day One to start reconstruction — but you never fought for it in the first place.
Best not be ripping the man who did.
• Kelly Sadler is the commentary editor at The Washington Times.
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