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Border "Security" Efforts Waste Precious Tax Dollars

KRWG News

Commentary: President Trump ran on several promises relating to immigration; one was the deportation of 11 million undocumented immigrants, another was building a wall to block further immigration.  It doesn’t seem likely that Mexico will pay any part of the 20 plus billion the wall is projected to cost. US taxpayers will pay and private contractors will benefit. We will also pay for additional thousands of new ICE and Border Patrol Agents at $15,000 per trainee, even before they begin to work.

The promised deportations are another part of the story.  US taxpayers pay approximately $159 per bed per day in detention centers, which includes ICE’s operational expenses.  Understand that people are not picked up one day and deported the next, they often spend weeks or months in detention waiting to go to court or to actually be deported after their court appearances.  In the meantime municipalities, counties, states and private corporations make money. US taxpayers would pay $160,000,000 per day if one million people were detained for one day. Do the math, those additional zeros quickly add up to numbers bigger than any of us can imagine

Now look at the cost of returning people to their countries of origin. In 2015 DHS asked for $229.1 million dollars to cover the costs of flights to Mexico and Central America. In 2014 we deported about 414,500 people by flying them to their countries of origin and by busing them across the Mexican border. Calculate and it quickly becomes a pretty big number. Again, private contractors are benefitting.

I, for one, would prefer that my tax money be spent on education, infrastructure, health care and the arts and not on an expensive and futile attempt to “secure our borders”.