Mexico border closing: Trump and US face logistical nightmare if he follows through with threats
John FritzeWASHINGTON – In the chaotic hours after President John F. Kennedy's assassination in 1963, U.S. officials took an extraordinary step that would be considered only a handful of times in the decades that followed: They sealed the U.S.-Mexico border.
As a newly sworn in President Lyndon Johnson departed Dallas for Washington, thousands of Americans and Mexicans were stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic at border crossings near El Paso, according to news reports at the time. Hours later, U.S. citizens were permitted to cross from Juarez back into Texas.
The decades-old episode underscores the immense logistical and legal challenges President Donald Trump would face if he follows through on a threat to "close the border" with Mexico, experts said. The move could disrupt more than $1.5 billion in goods and hundreds of thousands of people who cross the border legally every day.
"We'd be shooting ourselves in the foot by closing the border," said Stephen Yale-Loehr, a Cornell University law professor who specializes in immigration. "It’s like stopping funding for cancer research on the theory that we'll get fewer cancers."
Trump has a wide range of options available to him, such as removing inspectors from ports to slow traffic, increasing inspections and sealing the border entirely. Any of those actions could have a major impact on wait times at the border for everything from U.S.-made products to students heading to Mexico for their spring break.
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But Trump, who is set to visit the border Friday, is also hemmed in by competing laws and the potential economic impact of closing the border, which White House aides have acknowledged would be sizable. Several administration officials said the White House was considering less dramatic measures than a complete closure.
"Congress must get together and immediately eliminate the loopholes at the Border!" Trump wrote on Twitter on Wednesday. "If no action, Border, or large sections of Border, will close. This is a National Emergency!"
Slowing border traffic
Customs and Border Protection officials have already begun removing inspectors from some ports of entry to help with processing migrants. The administration justifies those transfers by pointing to the influx of Central American families claiming asylum. The port workers are required to help screen those new arrivals.
But the redistribution of border agents is already having an impact, according to an administration official speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss preliminary data. Vehicles entering the United States at Brownsville, Texas, on Monday waited about three hours, twice the normal peak wait time, the official said.
About 150 trucks, meanwhile, were backed up on Monday, waiting at an inspection facility near San Diego, the official said.
Those delays alone may be intended to send a message to Mexican officials, immigration experts said, that the country must do more to stem the flow of Central Americans crossing its own southern border. Mexico's President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said this week that he would "act with prudence" regarding Trump's threats.
"There’s two audiences here, one of them is Mexico – to get some more cooperation – and the other one is Congress," said Roy Beck, president of NumbersUSA, a group that advocates for lower levels of legal and illegal immigration. "You just wonder at what point will Congress take seriously at all this border situation."
Limited closings
Experts point to several other instances in which a president slowed traffic at ports of entry along the U.S.-Mexico border – often to send a message to Mexico – though those examples appear to have been something less than what Trump is threatening.
Following the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush grounded inbound international flights and imposed more stringent inspections on vehicles entering the country from Mexico and Canada. Administration officials moved the country to a higher security alert level, prohibiting agents from waving through vehicles without ID checks and more rigorous inspections.
"They started doing these vehicle-by-vehicle inspections and within hours you had queues of 10 to 15 hours at the border," said Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, who wrote a book on the U.S. response to the attacks.
There were also almost immediate economic consequences, Alden said. U.S. auto makers – within days of the tighter restrictions – began begging the administration and leaning on lawmakers to ease up on the inspections or assign more staff to ports so car parts made in Mexico and Canada could get through.
"Companies in the United States and Mexico and Canada depend on a reasonably effective border for the integrity of their operations," Alden said.
The most restrictive changes, he said, were lifted in about a week.
President Ronald Reagan closed nine border crossings and increased inspections at the rest in 1985, a response to the abduction and murder of Drug Enforcement Agency agent Enrique Camarena.
President Richard Nixon approved Operation Intercept during his first year in office, increasing inspections at U.S.-Mexico border crossings to stem the flow of drugs.
Andrew “Art” Arthur, a top immigration attorney in the Bush and Clinton administrations, said Trump's options include closing commercial traffic lanes at ports of entry, closing everything but commercial lanes, or closing certain ports altogether to funnel all traffic toward a more limited number of ports.
"Even the threat of doing it is probably going to be sufficient to encourage the Mexican government to do a better job of enforcing its southern border," said Arthur, now a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that advocates for lower levels of legal and illegal immigration.
White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow told CNBC this week that the administration has been "looking for ways to allow the freight passage ... which would ameliorate the breakdown in supply chains."
Closing border vs. travel ban
Federal law gives a president power to deny entry to "all aliens or any class of aliens,” which is the same provision Trump used early in his presidency to justify a travel ban on predominately Muslim nations. Though Trump was ultimately successful in that effort, the White House had to revise the order three times to fend off legal challenges.
Experts say closing the border for an extended period could run up against similar legal hurdles that initially blocked the travel ban – namely, competing provisions of the law. The Refugee Act of 1980 allows anyone to claim asylum in the U.S. once they are "physically present" in the country or at a "land border or port of entry."
"The main problem with closing the entire southern border or even large stretches of it is that it would make it impossible for most people to file asylum claims at the border, a specific right that Congress has provided," said Stephen Legomsky, a law professor at Washington University.
Contributing: David Jackson and Michael Collins