Where’s the Fence?
http://www.wnd.com/2016/11/1-main-reason-u-s-border-wall-hasnt-been-built/However, as WND reported in 2007 then Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson, R-Texas, submitted an amendment to the Department of Homeland Security 2008 budget that would effectively gut the Secure Fence Act.
The Hutchison amendment read, in part, “nothing in this paragraph shall require the Secretary of Homeland Security to install fencing, physical barriers, roads, lighting, cameras, and sensors in a particular location along an international border of the United States, if the Secretary determines that the use or placement of such resources is not the most appropriate means to achieve and maintain operational control over the international border at such location.”
By slipping the amendment into the 2008 DHS funding bill, Hutchison gave DHS total discretion to build a fence or to not build a fence in any particular location.
Hutchinson knew that if then-Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff had discretion on whether or not to build the fence, the Bush administration could always insist that negotiations at the local level along the border, including with Mexico, had resulted in solutions to border security – including cameras, drones, sensors and other technological surveillance measures – that would make the barrier unnecessary.
On Nov. 6, 2007, a DHS fact sheet documented that only 76 miles of a “pedestrian fence” had been built along the Mexican border, making it clear no double-layer barrier had been built.
On Jan. 25, 2008, then-Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., the author of the double-layer fence provisions of the Secure Fence Act of 2008, complained that only five miles of the 75-mile “pedestrian fence” then built was actually double-layer, as specified in the original legislation.
In 2014, Hunter’s son, Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., posted on his website an editorial he had published in a San Diego newspaper arguing that the fence specified by his father in the 2006 legislation still needed to be built.
“One of San Diego’s greatest assets is the double-layered border fence that extends inland from the Pacific Ocean,” Hunter wrote. “Fencing and infrastructure alone are by no means enough to stop illegal crossings, but the presence of physical impediments at the border, when supported by manpower and technology, create barriers that make entry increasingly more difficult and sometimes impossible.”
Hunter charged the Obama administration was lying in claiming that border infrastructure needs had been met, arguing that less than 40 miles of double-layered fence had been built along the Mexican border in the eight years that had gone by since the Secure Fence Act had been passed.
