“El Chapo ” should fund the border wall

by Alberto Lionarons/Contributing Writer

If a wall has to happen, this scenario would be the most ideal.

The Trump Administration may have found a solution to help fund its proposed Southern border wall without using taxpayer money or shutting down the government again.

Despite the fact that Trump won the 2016 election with his political platform of building a wall,  I don’t think it would be fair to force everyone who is against it to pay for it with their tax dollars, on the basis that he also lost the popular vote that year.

Democratic congressmen are not willing to sign a deal that gives adequate funding for such a project,

With that said, I don’t believe that a wall would be completely useless in combating the issue of illegal immigration, which costs the US an estimated $54 billion dollars each year.

The wall could effectively help reduce crime and would pretty much pay for itself given enough time.

If the Democrats refuse to allow taxpayer dollars to go to such a wall, where will Trump get the money? Mexico?

That might just be possible after a shocking development in the life of Mexico’s most infamous cartel boss, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.

El Chapo, the former leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, who was extradited to the US in early 2017, has been in the news recently due to how he was recently convicted in an ongoing drug trafficking court case.

Months after the criminal’s original extradition, Texas Senator, Ted Cruz introduced “The El Chapo Act”, an act that proposes to use El Chapo and the cartel’s seized assets, an estimated $14 billion dollars, to help fund the border wall.

Following the recent conviction, the act was reintroduced.

The main flaw with this plan is that we still do not know how much of that $14 billion is actually seizable.

However, according to past build estimates, the wall could be built as cheap as $5.5 billion.

Regardless, the seized assets could at least put a decent dent into completing a project of this scale.

Not only would it help us avoid another meaningless government shutdown, but it would literally take back decades worth of American drug money and put it towards national security project that would interfere with the human and drug trafficking that happens over the border.

At the very least, we can hope that any assets seized from this case go to funding something actually beneficial to the American people.

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The opinions presented within this page do not represent the views of Panther Press Editorial Board. These views are separate from editorials and reflect individual perspectives of contributing writers and/or members of the University community.

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