On immigration it's sometimes hard to decide whether the Bush
Administration is guilty of gross incompetence or outright
mendacity.
An
argument for the former:
TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) - The government is scrapping a $20 million
prototype of its highly touted "virtual fence" on the
Arizona-Mexico border because the system is failing to adequately
alert border patrol agents to illegal crossings, officials
said.
The move comes just two months after Homeland Security Secretary
Michael Chertoff announced his approval of the fence built by The
Boeing Co.
And evidence of the latter from the same article:
Agents began using the virtual fence last December,
and the towers have resulted in more than 3,000 apprehensions
since, said Greg Giddens, executive director of the SBI program
office in Washington....
Project 28 was not intended to be the final, state of
the art system for catching illegal immigrants, Giddens said. "I
think some people understood that and some didn't. We didn't
communicate that well."
More evidence that opponents of "comprehensive" immigration
reform were right to doubt that securing the borders would actually
happen.
topics:
Immigration
