Barriers built in the Rio Grande floodplain will either wash away during floods or become dams that worsen the flooding.
Much of the government has been shut down for more than 16 days because President Donald Trump insists that Congress fund a border wall that is both a terrible idea and illegal.
The shutdown is because Trump demands extending the existing border walls and barriers to vast areas that make no sense largely because they are in the Rio Grande floodplain. Building barriers in that floodplain was such a problematic idea that a 1970 treaty between United States and Mexico explicitly bans them.
“The president really doesn’t understand the issue,” House Armed Services Committee Chair Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on Sunday. “But we have actually already built a wall across much of the border, and all border security experts that I talk to say, where a wall makes sense, it’s already been built.”
View the complete January 7 article by Joe Romm on the ThinkProgress website here.