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Who Will Man the Wall?

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Posted: March 12th, 2019

By Walter Pincus

Pulitzer Prize Winning Journalist Walter Pincus is a contributing senior national security columnist for The Cipher Brief. He spent forty years at The Washington Post, writing on topics that ranged from nuclear weapons to politics. He is the author of Blown to Hell: America's Deadly Betrayal of the Marshall Islanders. Pincus won an Emmy in 1981 and was the recipient of the Arthur Ross Award from the American Academy for Diplomacy in 2010.  He was also a team member for a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 and the George Polk Award in 1978.  

OPINION — Set aside for a moment how you feel about building the wall. There is a more immediate issue in controlling the flow of illegal traffic and drugs on the southwest border, and that is the hiring and retaining of Customs and Border Patrol Officers.

With all of the recent debate about the wall, what has been ignored almost entirely, is the problem in implementing President Trump’s January 2017 Executive Order calling for an increase in the Border Patrol by 5,000. There has been no such increase. In fact, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), “as of early February 2019, Border Patrol had 19,443 agents on board, which is 6,927 agents below the [Trump executive order] target level.”

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