The law Congress enacted specifically directed that “the Secretary of Homeland Security shall provide for at least 2 layers of reinforced fencing, the installation of additional physical barriers, roads, lighting, cameras, and sensors” along about 700 miles of the almost 2000-mile long border.
“We originally passed legislation asking for 700 miles,” Lungren told CNSNews.com Wednesday. “It doesn’t look like that’s going to happen. What we do have is a good faith effort on the part of Homeland Security under Secretary Chertoff to actually end up before he leaves with about 370 miles of pedestrian fence, and probably 300 miles of vehicle fence.”
The U.S. Border Patrol, part of the Department of Homeland Security, is overseeing construction of the barrier.
“We’ve just surpassed having 500 miles of fence along the border – physically there – and still maintain our goal of reaching 670 miles,” Border Patrol Asst. Chief Lloyd Easterling told CNSNews.com Wednesday.
“We anticipate having 90 to 95 percent of that done right around the end of the calendar year,” he added.
There are stretches of fence in areas running from the Pacific Ocean all the way to the Gulf of Mexico, but the Border Patrol spokesman admits it isn’t continuous along the 2000-mile frontier -- or even the eventual 670 mile length.
“Of course there are breaks in it -- in places out in very remote areas where fencing would do us no good, and in fact possibly hinder us, because we would have to be getting out to these areas mainly to repair it,” Easterling said. “If nobody is out there and able to keep an eye on and patrol in those areas, then the fence would likely be destroyed.”
And Lungren is correct, he said, that the “fence” involves several different kinds of fencing--pedestrian and vehicle fencing--with different styles based on the terrain.
In urban areas, he said, it is the double-walled steel fence Congress envisioned in the law that mandates "at least 2 layers of reinforced fencing."
“In Yuma Ariz., for instance, what we did out there was we put in old steel landing mat fencing – where we took old landing mat that wasn’t being used for anything else, and we were able to erect that into a solid pedestrian fence, anywhere from 12 to 18 feet high,” Easterling said.
“Further out, we were able to use bollard-style fencing where it looks like posts you would see in a parking lot, that are spaced out, and they are also at differing heights in order to make ramping more difficult,” he added.
