Mike Huckabee (file photo)
Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee visited the U.S. border with Mexico last weekend and he’s touting his approach to border security this week during campaign stops in Iowa.
“A double-fence, plus personnel, plus the electronic monitoring means that we actually would do something that a country has to do to be free and to be its own country — secure its own borders,” Huckabee says.
Huckabee says within the first year of his presidency, he’d build a fence along the entire southern U-S border. Huckabee visited San Diego this past weekend where the border patrol had been taking into custody nearly half-a-million unauthorized immigrants every year.
“They built a double wall in that 12-mile corridor and those apprehensions went down to 30,000 — a 95 percent decrease in illegal apprehensions,” Huckabee says.
The 1700-mile Alaska Highway through Canada was built in a year during World War II and Huckabee says a border fence could go up just as quickly. Huckabee spoke early this morning to a crowd of about 100 at the Westside Breakfast Club in Urbandale. Huckabee is making stops in nine Iowa cities this week. He’s campaigning this afternoon and evening in Ottumwa, Fairfield and Douds.
(Additional reporting by Iowa Public Radio’s Joyce Russell in Urbandale)