Secure Border Initiative Part 7

Further, the environmentalists have forced the Agents to stop using a drag made of old tires to smooth the surface of the road so that northbound footprints can be seen in the dust. Even just smoothing the road to see the drug smuggler’s footprints is environmental damage. Are you seeing a plan here?

Another eagerly funded technology yet to meet with any sanity check is the installation of a GPS system on each Border Patrol vehicle, horse, and Agent. No one has yet asked the Border Patrol Union about this level of snooping on its members.

When it comes to Boeing’s border barrier construction, it gets worse. Present Boeing requirements are for a barrier that can withstand a 6,000 pound vehicle hitting it at 40 miles per hour. The implication here is that the driver won’t survive the event and that drug smugglers go on suicide missions. All it really means is that the driver — to survive — will not drive a 6,000 pound vehicle but instead a 60,000 pound vehicle. Further, they must also think the driver won’t find a way of getting up to 40 miles an hour on the Mexican side of the border. It is true, however, that the noise from such an exciting enterprise would attract Agents even from over the horizon, but unless John Wayne’s War Wagon of 1967 can be resurrected, America should be safe with a far less paranoid and far more effective migratory encumbrance.

Such a requirement shows a set of thought processes completely devoid of any understanding of how smugglers operate or think. What smugglers usually do is hack away at a barrier for days or weeks and then quietly slide through. Other smugglers build interesting ramps and simply drive over the low vehicle barriers now being installed.

The present Boeing inspired Barrier can be considered little more than a speed bump to smugglers. Nobody’s going to be crazy enough to crash through it, it’s only four feet high, they’ll just go over it. Smugglers can be far more brainy than Boeing might believe …

For example, there are places along the border where border barriers of six inch diameter steel pipe are planted in wet concrete during the day and are dug up and replaced with the same steel pipe — without the concrete foundation — at night. Time passes. Drug convoys arrive at the border, they pop the loose bits of pipe out of the ground and then race north with millions of dollars in drugs. What does Boeing take these people for … Fools?

For an effective vehicle barrier all one needs is something that takes time to destroy or evade. So long as it takes hours of fiddling to get past the barrier there can be lots of people in green and white vehicles on the north side of the border arriving all at once and almost hoping for cordite smoke to soon waft in the air.