President Donald Trump, in spite of his empty claims that he is the most military-friendly president of all time, is preparing to withdraw funds from schools and daycare centers serving military families and to launch standby projects to pay the promised border wall.
The Pentagon is dedicating billions of dollars from already funded projects at military bases around the world to advance fence construction along the U.S.-Mexico border, Department of Defense (DOD) officials said on Wednesday.
The department pointed out that transferring funds from military childcare facilities was not DOD's idea. "A Pentagon official said in a press conference that Trump's department had received a" legitimate order "to divert the funds," Reuters reported Wednesday.
The department also stressed that the daycare and other projects that will be cut financially should lay the foundation in the next fiscal year, suggesting that they won't stop working on active construction to pull money to the limit.
Late projects related to the quality of life for families at bases include a new elementary school attached to a U.S. military facility in Germany, a day care center in Maryland that hosts the main teams responsible for the maintenance and operation of Air Force One are in charge and a new fire station at a Marine Corps facility in South Carolina. The Pentagon said that building homes for troops and families on bases would be rendered harmless in the fund diversion.
According to the New York Times, the department has also postponed various projects related to the training and readiness of the troops themselves. A gun line in Oklahoma, a cyber defense system in Virginia, various unspecified flight simulators, planned repairs to ports and shooting range facilities are being mothballed to erect the fence, according to the Times.
According to a department letter released on Tuesday by The Daily Beast, $ 3.6 billion of DOD funds already provided will flow into Trump's fencing projects. The word "wall" appears zero times in the letter listing the location, but it does list locations and structural details for 140 total miles of new fence. Much of this length replaces or extends existing structures.
More than a third of the total cost and mileage is on the Rio Grande riverside, which extends north of Laredo, Texas. However, the majority of the other projects either replace existing pedestrian and vehicle barriers with newer versions or add additional layers to existing fence lines.
Much of the US-Mexico border is already delimited by previous governments' efforts to improve security. These projects have left scars in border communities where property owners who are subject to a significant domain often received low-ball compensation offers and misleading statements about how the new barriers would affect their ability to use the land they built after the federal government was built still own.
Litigation and massive settlements followed these earlier waves of construction and contributed to the upfront costs of the projects. The government's great insight into what had gone wrong was that the rush to such projects caused avoidable waste and violated landlords' rights.
If the people wronged by hasty government experts and lawyers are rich, they can afford to sue something and provide fair compensation. It's the little people – families who live in modest areas, medium-sized livestock farms and farms that look plentiful on paper but actually achieve razor-sharp profit margins – that get confused for good.
A problem for these people, as residents of South Texas’s theinformationsuperhighway said in the spring, is that the engineers who construct the fences often don’t want to hold on to the river itself.
Norie Garza has been building a small vacation home on the riverside for almost a decade. In 2018, the authorities showed up to let them know that new fences would be created behind their country. The engineers showed compassion, but still pushed legal documents to her.
"Basically you sign it or spend thousands of dollars (fight) and at the end of the day you still have to allow them to come in," she said.
Sugar cane farmer and rancher Sam Sparks III broadly endorses the idea of fighting drug traffickers in his area, but said that these areas can be both secured and productive for the families in which sweat and millions of dollars have been invested over the years a fiction.
The engineers offer to install security gates and distribute passwords so that people like Sparks, who had fenced in about half of his family's 2,000 hectares, can prevent their southern acreage from falling vacant. But that is not a solution.
"(Traffickers) will no doubt contact those who have this code," said Sparks. Even if he were the type who armed himself and continued to work, the fence could isolate, he said, that he would never be able to hire workers to do so.
"If you put a wall over this property, nobody will want to work down there in the 900 acres, because then you will be trapped. If you are in danger, there is no escape," he said. "We need protection. We have to stop because it's out of control. But what are we willing to sacrifice if we do that? "
