I got the idea for this image from Phillip Bump's OpEd in the Washington Post: “Based on Trump’s detailed diagram of his slat wall, we did some advanced mathematics”
Bump crunched some numbers using the drawing in the Trump Tweet (right) which showed a small Border Control SUV to base his calculations on and came up with a nine inch gap between the steel slats.
Excerpts:
There was a problem, though, that also crept into his rhetoric. Trump warned drug dealers, stymied by the wall, would simply throw bags of drugs over the top of it, potentially killing anyone walking on the other side. (We talked to experts; such a throw would be a remarkable feat.) So, he said, the wall needed windows or, somehow, to be transparent.
Would this even be effective?
This is really the crux of the question, isn’t it? Is a barrier this long at these dimensions actually something that would work to keep out people and illegal drugs?
It clearly wouldn’t do much about the latter. Most drugs that cross that border illegally
already come through ports of entry, smuggled in vehicles or on people crossing legally. What’s more, a barrier with nine-inch gaps seems like it might allow for pretty easy transfer of bulky packages, without having to throw them 25 feet in the air to clear the wall.
What’s more, an nine-inch gap wouldn’t necessarily keep people out. In 2010, a prisoner in a jail in Tennessee
escaped his cell by covering himself with grease and squeezing between bars set 4.5 inches apart. He would have found the steel slats — with gaps between that are twice that size — practically roomy.
No doubt Trump in his warped mind envisions desperate migrants, whether the small percentage who are drug smugglers or not, being impaled on sharp spikes should they try to get over the wall.
No matter how much space there is between the slats it doesn’t take a degree in advanced arithmetic (if there is such a thing) to figure out that even if the slats are a few inches apart smugglers can package the drugs in long tubes to fit between them.