Vice President Kamala Harris’s visit to El Paso, Texas today was probably not intended to showcase the success of the Trump administration’s immigration and border enforcement policies. But Harris has nevertheless picked the perfect city from which to learn what policies have actually worked to secure the border. The only way she could learn more about the border than by choosing to go to El Paso would be if she had invited former President Trump to join her. Harris may not know it, but El Paso has played a definitive role in the decades-long fight to curb illegal immigration along the U.S. southern border stretching all the way back to when the city was the initial headquarters of U.S. Border Patrol.
Under the deportation policies of the early 1990s, Border Patrol agents apprehended as many aliens as they could, but even those deported generally found ways to make it back across the border in the following days and weeks. Observing the ineffectiveness of this approach, Silvestre Reyes, then-Chief of the El Paso Sector of Border Patrol, decided that deterring illegal entry into the country altogether was a more efficient strategy than focusing solely on apprehensions.
“They thought I was crazy,” Reyes said. “But I told them: ‘I’m not interested in apprehensions. I’m not interested in generating numbers. I’m interested in controlling the border.’”
Under Reyes’s leadership, Border Patrol’s Operation Hold the Line increased the volume of border agents and dramatically improved the physical barriers already in place in El Paso starting in 1993. The Operation ................
