SoCal Reality Check for Donald Trump’s Border Wall Musings

Trump: See, CNN? My hair isn’t always orange. (White House photo)

There’s a strip of Southern California oceanfront real estate that for decades has been a continual Orange County landing spot for immigrants traveling from Mexico and Central America by boat to enter the U.S. without government approval.

Federal government officials charged with protecting borders know this fact well, but, regardless of presidential administration, continuously appear baffled by the situation.

I’ve read dozens of U.S. law enforcement agency reports for decades recounting how boats loaded with poor, desperate passengers circumvent San Diego, travel for hours a couple of miles offshore, even navigate easily by Camp Pendleton’s U.S. Marine base and then head inland to a beach located near Pacific Coast Highway between Laguna Beach and Newport Coast.

As Vikki Vargas at NBC in Los Angeles reported, another such incident happened yesterday at that exact spot, Crystal Cove, where police found an empty boat and witnesses who saw people racing inland near gated neighborhoods occupied by people worth billions of dollars.

Just days earlier—like it has year after year, a similar landing happened in the same area.

If the U.S. government with all of its high-tech night-vision equipment, round-the-clock land patrols, spy satellites, secretly-placed cameras, drones, planes, helicopters, ever-increasing massive surveillance budgets and naval ships routinely can’t detect more than a dozen unsophisticated people crowded on cheap, relatively slow-moving boats traveling for 95 miles close to our coast, will new border walls with Mexico really be the foolproof answer President Donald Trump and his allies claim?

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