Walls Don’t Stop Caravans of Thousands

President Trump has a warning:

It’s a funny thing. Trump keeps going on about his hobbyhorse wall, but as we all know, last year’s caravan from the Honduras marched straight up through Mexico along the longest route possible in order to end up in the very area with the biggest, most secure wall we have: San Diego. What’s more, as the map below shows, that’s exactly where the Army figured they’d go. And the alternate routes were all big cities with walls too: El Paso, Piedras Negras, Laredo, McAllen, and Brownsville:

These migrant caravans are positively enthralled by the wall we already have! And they’re really easy to stop: When they get to Tijuana—or whatever legal port of entry they’re heading for—you just refuse to let them in so they can apply for asylum. Piece of cake.

So if there is another caravan on its way, there’s no point in building a wall to stop them. No caravan of thousands of men, women, and children is going to cross the US border in the middle of the Mojave Desert or the Arizona Plateau. Their destination is a legal port of entry where they can apply for asylym, and those places already have walls. So maybe we can stop burbling on about the wall and instead do something about our asylum process?

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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