Homeland Security Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin says President Donald Trump’s “big beautiful bill” will provide her department with material and funding for the border wall and about 3,000 more border patrol agents.
“We’re going to with this big, beautiful bill…we’ll get about 3000 new border patrol agents,” McLaughlin said. “We’ll get cutting-edge technology, hundreds more miles of wall, which we need. We know a physical barrier matters.”
{snip}
The law includes key components of Trump’s campaigned-upon agenda, such as no taxes on tips, increased border security funding and extending his 2017 tax cuts.
“We know a physical barrier matters, and it does prevent people from illegally entering our country,” McLaughlin said.
McLaughlin pointed out the lower number of illegal immigrants at the U.S. southern border has freed up border patrol agents to be able to focus on deportations. “They’re not stuck at the processing centers,” she said.
“They can actually go out into the field and get these nefarious actors, whether it be drug mules, human traffickers, drug traffickers [or] potential terrorists. These are the people that we really need to keep out of our country.”
{snip}
McLaughlin said the administration is keeping all options on the table when it comes to cracking down on border security.
In 2023, Texas began to install a floating barrier along the Rio Grande in order to stop migrants from crossing into the U.S. illegally. “I think we’re keeping everything on the table,” she said. “We’re also looking at those buoys as well, preventing anyone from coming over…from swimming over in shallow water. But what we want, really, is that physical infrastructure.”
{snip}
“Our arrest numbers, as they stand, are about 250,000, and we want those numbers up,” she said. “We want to turbocharge them. That’s part of the reason why that big full bill is so important, because it increases our detention capacity to 100,000 beds.”
