TODD MILLER toddmemomiller[at]gmail.com, @memomiller
Miller, author of Border Patrol Nation: Dispatches From the Front Lines of Homeland Security, just wrote the piece “No Need to Build The Donald’s Wall, It’s Built,” for TomDispatch.com.

He said today: “Last night Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump … said that he is going to build an ‘impenetrable, tall, powerful, beautiful southern border wall.’ He said that it will be equipped with the most sophisticated technology imaginable, sensors that can detect people both above and below, aerial surveillance, and an upsurge of agents. However, Trump is describing what already exists. There is already a wall. There is already sophisticate technology including aerial systems and surveillance towers. And there are already more than 21,000 Border Patrol agents, a five-fold increase since the early 1990s. Clearly, Trump would add to this if he won the presidency. However, he would be building on the most massive border enforcement regime that has already been created in the United States, by both political parties.”

Miller wrote: “Although wall construction began during Bill Clinton’s administration, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) built most of the approximately 700 miles of fencing after the Secure Fence Act of 2006 was passed. At the time, Senator Hillary Clinton voted in favor of that Republican-introduced bill, along with 26 other Democrats. ‘I voted numerous times when I was a senator to spend money to build a barrier to try to prevent illegal immigrants from coming in,’ she commented at one 2015 campaign event, ‘and I do think you have to control your borders. … If the comprehensive immigration reform that Hillary Clinton pledges to introduce as president is based on the already existing bipartisan Senate package, as has been indicated, then this corporate-enforcement landscape will be significantly bolstered and reinforced.”