After your Pulitzer Prize winning coverage of the proposed wall and the challenges of building it, relative silence would appear to have descended, given the amount of coverage and analysis it gets. What has the building of this wall actually achieved? The contractors are making money. Trump supporters believe that he has followed up on his promise. A lot of money has been spent. 51,000 immigrants are detained in private for profit prisons each of them costing $150 a day. In 2017 ICE spent $2.7 billion to lock up undocumented adults and children. The worst abuses of separating children from their parents have been stopped as far as we know though the cages are still there. We have placed new physical and bureaucratic hurdles for anyone trying to enter the United States.

Has it stopped drug trafficking? Law enforcement will tell you that the majority of the drugs still come through the big ports of entry. The border is crossable if you have the money and can pay but if you can't, the challenges of walking across the Sonora-Arizona desert are formidable. Just the Tohono O'odham reservation section is larger than Connecticut. So the wall pushes people into more dangerous areas where they can't carry enough water to keep themselves alive. The wall is actually killing people. From Oct 2018 to Sep 2019 the human remains of 137 migrants were found. Countless human remains are never found. Official records show that between 2001 and 2013 2,200 migrants' remains were brought to the Tucson Medical Examiner's office. I couldn't find the official overall record since then.

So it looks as if the wall is successfully punishing those who dare to make the long journey away from horrendous violence and abject poverty. The immigrants are caught between two very hard rocks in a desperate struggle to find a better way of life for themselves and their families. The "huddled masses" are now confronted by Keep Out signs and, stranded on the border and identifiable because their lack shoelaces, which have been taken away as a safety measure by ICE, have to confront criminals trying to extort money from their relatives.

The irony of all this is that our economy needs workers. The restaurant and hospitality industry would be in serious trouble without them. Businesses owned by immigrants employ more than 8 million Americans and add $1 trillion to the economy. It is estimated that 750,000 of those entrepreneurs are illegal. The huddled masses apparently want to work and do well and for their children to succeed.

Not all is dark. The crisis has ignited some of the better angels of the American soul. Charities and organizations are reaching out to offer assistance. Americans are still capable of great compassion and courageously confront the consequences of the cruelties and hatred of a xenophobic administration. We have to believe that love, not hatred and fear, will win the day. More importantly we all need to do more to confront the darkness. "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke