This, in spite of enviro-wackjobs.
The Supreme Court said Monday it won’t stand in the way as the U.S. extends its security fence hundreds of miles along the border with Mexico, allowing building to proceed full-speed despite claims that it harms the environment and animals that live in the area.
……Given sporadic attention for years, the concept of a border fence took on new life after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, which also revived the nation’s heated immigration debate. Intelligence officials have said the holes along the southwest border could provide places for terrorists to enter the country.
On Monday, the court declined to hear arguments in a case brought by environmental groups that could have slowed or even halted the multibillion-dollar fence project that stretches from the Pacific surf at Tijuana to the Gulf of Mexico near Brownsville, Texas. Some 331 miles of fencing had been constructed as of June 13, with about as much still to go.
The case involved a two-mile section of fence in the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area near Naco, Ariz. The section has already been built. Environmentalists have said the fence puts already endangered species such as two types of wild cats — the ocelot and the jaguarundi — in even more danger. The fence would prevent them from swimming across the Rio Grande to mate.
http://www.gopusa.com/news/2008/june/0624_border_fence1.shtml
More importantly, it will prevent the illegals and terrorists from swimming across.
For once, national security and common sense trump asinine causes like the snail darter….remember that one?
That’s why I’m all for securing the border with guard towers, machine guns, thousands of Border agents, land mines, the Army Corps of engineers on hand to blow up the tunnels, AND a wall. You enviro-wackos are a piece of work. You whine over “environmental” crap, while thousands of rapists, thieves, murderers, pedophiles, MS-13 gang members, and a whole shitload of new welfare recipients with no intention of assimilating into American culture, traipse across the border.
SFC MAC
The politicians who voted for the Secure Fence Act were primarily interested in the symbolism of a wall, not its substance, otherwise they would have checked to see if the original San Diego border wall had worked. In fact, it hadn’t. The Congressional Research Service concluded that the border wall “did not have a discernible impact on the influx of unauthorized aliens coming across the border in San Diego.” Recent Border Patrol statistics bear this conclusion out. Fiscal year 2007 saw a 7% increase in illegal crossings in the San Diego sector. In contrast, during the same year crossings border-wide dropped by 20%. The Del Rio sector, which like the rest of Texas east of El Paso has never had a wall, saw a 46% drop. The unwalled Rio Grande Valley saw a 34% drop, bringing illegal entries in that sector to a 15 year low. Even Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff recognized the border wall’s ineffectiveness, saying, “I think the fence has come to assume a certain kind of symbolic significance which should not obscure the fact that it is a much more complicated problem than putting up a fence which someone can climb over with a ladder or tunnel under with a shovel.”