Four hundred and nine billion dollars.

That’s how much the United States has spent on border security since the founding of the Department of Homeland Security in 2003. Despite all that spending, border security remains a central concern today, just as it did during the last election.

The Trump campaign’s focus on border security is understandable, but fixating on ineffective, expensive “solutions” that only exacerbate issues is not.

Further, as the officer in command of 6,000 troops dispatched to the border in 2018 and 2019 to help secure it, I know that killing a bipartisan border security deal that would have provided real, workable solutions was an enormous setback.

In 2020, the Trump administration diverted $13 million from a military unit under my command that was assigned to help train and support border security efforts, all to build less than one mile of border wall in a remote desert.

This decision reflected broader mismanagement of resources, prioritizing symbolic gestures over effective solutions.

The administration also tried to reallocate $2.5 billion from critical military programs without congressional........

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