Trump Admin Issues Emergency Bypass To Red Tape, Orders Wall Construction In Area Near San Diego!

Here are more details on this story, from the Washington Examiner:

The Department of Homeland Security announced Friday that Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen has given U.S. Customs and Border Protection permission to ignore environmental and land regulations to expedite construction of a secondary barrier, or wall, that runs parallel to the primary one between Tijuana and San Diego.

The secondary wall is meant to run for 12 miles and is expected to be 18 feet tall, a sector spokesman told the Washington Examiner during a visit to the region last year. 

The Army Corps of Engineers awarded the project in December. 

The San Diego Sector is unique as a southwest border sector in that it has had a double wall for two decades, but it has still seen active smuggling efforts and increased illegal immigration in recent years. Despite the double wall, people were easily getting over or through both of them, prompting the sector to step up its infrastructure. 

In fiscal year 2018, the Border Patrol's San Diego Sector, one of nine on the southern border, arrested 38,000 people. In the first four months of 2019, the region has hit nearly half the total number apprehended last year. 

"Tactical infrastructure, when combined with the appropriate technology and personnel, significantly reduces the amount of illegal border entries and enhances the Border Patrol’s ability to secure the border," DHS said in a statement. 

The "primary" wall, or that which is closest to Mexico, stretches 14 miles from Imperial Beach on the Pacific Ocean past the Otay Mesa port of entry and into the mountains, where it is difficult to travel on foot or vehicle. 

The main wall was installed in 1991. It consists of thousands of 8- to 10-foot-tall corrugated steel "landing mats." The mats were surplus material from the Vietnam War that had been meant to serve as helicopter landing pads in rice paddies. 

In the early 1990s, agents were making more apprehensions of illegal entrants in their 60-mile stretch of the border than all apprehensions seen across the border last year. Prior to 1991, barbed wire fencing was all there was to stop people from entering the country outside of a port, and it wasn't installed continuously across the border. In 1997, San Diego began installing a secondary wall. 

In 2016, San Diego learned it would receive federal funding to replace the landing mats with bollard fencing, which consists of vertical steel posts that have been planted in the ground.

And here is the FULL official Press Release from the Department of Homeland Security:

Release Date: 

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February 8, 2019

WASHINGTON – The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has issued a waiver to ensure the expeditious construction and replacement of approximately 12.5 miles of secondary wall near the international border in the state of California. The waiver was published in the Federal Register on February 7, 2019.

This waiver is pursuant to authority granted to the Secretary of Homeland Security by Congress. Congress has provided the Secretary of Homeland Security with a number of authorities necessary to carry out DHS’s border security mission. One of these authorities is found in section 102 of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, as amended (“IIRIRA”).  Section 102(a) of IIRIRA provides that the Secretary of Homeland Security shall take such actions as may be necessary to install additional physical walls and roads near the United States border to deter illegal crossings in areas of high illegal entry into the United States. In section 102(b) of IIRIRA, Congress has called for the installation of additional fencing, walls, roads, lighting, cameras, and sensors on the southwest border. Finally, in section 102(c) of IIRIRA, Congress granted to the Secretary of Homeland Security the authority to waive all legal requirements that the Secretary, in Secretary’s sole discretion, determines necessary to ensure the expeditious construction of the walls and roads authorized by section 102 of IIRIRA.

The approximately 14-mile bollard style wall project in San Diego that was awarded by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on December 20, 2018, will include an area that begins near the eastern end of Border Field State Park and extends east to where the existing primary pedestrian fence ends.

Tactical infrastructure, when combined with the appropriate technology and personnel, significantly reduces the amount of illegal border entries and enhances the Border Patrol’s ability to secure the border. San Diego Sector was the busiest sector in the nation during the early 1990s. The construction of infrastructure has reduced illegal entries; however, more work remains to be done. In Fiscal Year 2018, there were over 38,000 apprehensions in the San Diego Sector by Border Patrol. In this Fiscal Year to date San Diego Sector has apprehended over 18,500 illegal immigrants, a more than 69 percent increase of the apprehensions for same period last fiscal year.

DHS remains committed to environmental stewardship. DHS has been consulting, and intends to continue doing so, with stakeholders including other federal and state resource agencies. Such consultation facilitates DHS’s assessment of potential impacts and informs its efforts to minimize, to the extent possible, potential impacts to the environment, wildlife, and cultural and historic resources.

The Department of Homeland Security continues to implement President Trump’s Executive Order 13767 - also known as Border Security and Immigration Enforcement Improvements – and continues to take steps to immediately plan, design, and construct a physical wall along the southern border, using appropriate materials and technology to most effectively achieve complete operational control of the southern border.

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