Tump was trying to build wall to prevent immigration. Drugs do not come from immigrants but from cartels through different means. Trump's idea has never been about stopping all commercial exchange at the border nor dismantling every single vehicle crossing the border in search of pills.

Additionnally, if cartels can't smuggle drugs through the border, they'll build fentanyl shops inside the USA.

"Unauthorized" border crossing (and otherwise innocent) immigrants are a key piece of the cartel smuggling apparatus. They are used as bait to overwhelm CBP resources (and asylum seekers often want to be caught, theyll be given a court date to make their asylum case and in many cases released), once the resources are overloaded the drug smugglers go through the rugged terrain to drop-off points.

By this you are basically implying we should rather open the border totally so that drug smugglers can't use them.

That's what I would do, yes. Although I didn't mean to imply that with my previous statement. The closed border approach would be to somehow erect a barrier that lessens the ability for them to consume CBP resources between ports of entry.

Sorry, but you really need to listen to what Trump actually said instead of listening to his stuff filtered by the media. He definitely did say that the wall would help stop drugs. Even DEA law-enforcement agreed with him that it would help. And yes, there is a significant amount of drug trafficking carried out by people crossing the border. Whether they are "true" migrants or "cartel employed" is irrelevant.

https://cis.org/Arthur/Yuma-Reveals-How-Migrant-Surge-Has-Fu...

"..they'll build fentanyl shops inside the USA..."

US law-enforcement would love this to happen. Damn easy to get a court order and bust up. Damn easy to setup informants to reveal such locations. Its like comparing peanut impacts versus asteriod impacts. You solve the critical asteroid problem first. The peanuts don't really make any significant difference.

> thwarted by Democrats

The 115th United States Congress: Senate majority - Republican, House majority - Republican, Presidency - Republican.

Blame the party not in power.

As you should know, they did pass legislation in that time, only to have it blocked once they lost power and further neutered with the recent admin.

Further, there's only so much an admin can focus on and they had a variety of other issues. My point stands which is that one party is very focused on this issue and worked towards concrete measures against it, while the other worked against them.