The Towers! They Do Nothing!

David Weigel | April 23, 2008

An update from the ever-less-bitter immigration wars:

The government is scrapping a $20 million prototype of its highly touted "virtual fence" on the Arizona-Mexico border because the system is failing to adequately alert border patrol agents to illegal crossings, officials said.

The move comes just two months after Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced his approval of the fence built by The Boeing Co. The fence consists of nine electronic surveillance towers along a 28-mile section of border southwest of Tucson.

This just two months after feds admitted they couldn't even finish building the useless thing. More hilarity from the dry run:

Agents began using the virtual fence last December, and the towers have resulted in more than 3,000 apprehensions since, said Greg Giddens, executive director of the SBI program office in Washington.

But that's just a fraction of the several hundred illegal immigrants believed to cross the border daily near southwest of Tucson.

It's not a secret that the Bush administration was engaging in kabuki here. It did the same thing on the non-virtual, brick-and-morter fence that'll never be built.

Headline explained here.