MSNBC proved one thing with Jacob Soboroff’s “up-close look” at the border wall and its prototypes — getting up close to the issue can be dangerous for your political assumptions. In the middle of a clearly skeptical but professional interview with a Border Patrol representative about the future design of the wall Donald Trump insists will get built, MSNBC’s cameras pick up the reason why Trump and many others have demanded it. Three intruders jump over the existing barrier at about the 2:20 mark (via Twitchy):
Greetings from Mexico. Got an up-close look at Trump's almost-done border wall prototypes from both sides of border. https://t.co/AJULBGx5RP
— Jacob Soboroff (@jacobsoboroff) October 23, 2017
Give Soboroff and MSNBC credit for sticking with the development all the way through. This was not a live piece in its entirety; they edited the interview with the Border Patrol rep, and deliberately kept this in the segment. They could just as easily discarded it and pretended it never happened.
Soboroff later crosses over to talk with people on the other side of the border, who assure him people will get through no matter how well the wall eventually gets built. However, it’s pretty clear that we can do better than this:
On one side of the border, that wall appears to be six feet or more higher than the surface. On the other, soil has been stacked up in various heights. At this point of the wall, it comes up to about Soboroff’s waist, making it easy to cross, as clearly intended.
In other words, we have a wall that doesn’t work. It’s time to replace it with one that does, and it appears that the Border Patrol and the Trump administration are taking that task seriously.
Addendum: Perhaps one can make the argument that the Border Patrol managed to catch up with the intruders well enough with the existing wall. That may have more to do with the fact that the illegal aliens chose to cross at a point where a news network was shooting its segment, which would have required extra security. Talk about bad luck…
