In order to actually DO "border security", you need to have a Congress willing to have meaningful hearings, where everyone invested in this comes in and contributes to the discussion - literal security experts, immigration policy experts, and immigrant support groups. THEN you can craft and markup legislation to deal with it.
The problem today is that there is this demand for "instant" jingoistic solutions to a "problem" that few can actually define outside of yelling "MS-13!!111!!", "DRUGS!!!11!!", "ILLEGALS!!1111!!".
If you can't define the problem, then you will never be able to have a lasting solution.
For example, Democrats HAVE put forward legislation - like the DREAM ACT, which describes what would be done with one current MAJOR crises - children born in the U.S. to undocumented immigrants (or brought here as infants/young children by their foreign parents). But people have been so caught up in the media's amplification of the hysterical and hyperbolic rhetoric, that the meat and bones of that legislation has been ignored and the GOP in Congress refuse to pass it (yelling "AMNESTY!!1111!!!" ). The deportation of the parents of these children often means that they try to come back (or sneak back) in to be with them.
DREAM ACT
The DREAM Act (short for Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act) was a bill in Congress that would have granted legal status to certain undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children and went to school here. Although several versions of the bill have been introduced in Congress since 2001, it has never passed. In the last few years the term “DREAMer” has been used to describe young undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children, who have lived and gone to school here, and who in many cases identify as American. The term DREAMer originally took its name from the bill in Congress, but it has a double meaning about the undocumented youth who have big hopes and dreams for a better future.
https://www.adl.org/education/educator-resources/lesson-plans/what-is-the-dream-act-and-who-are-the-dreamers
And oddly enough, when it literally comes to "border security", one of our BIGGEST unprotected borders are the 2 coasts - Atlantic and Pacific - that are purportedly guarded by an increasingly diminished Coast Guard. Anyone can just roll up on a beach in Oregon and unload. So again, when one talks about "comprehensive", it needs to truly be "comprehensive", not just political cherry-picking a focus on people coming across a border from Mexico (the vast majority of whom are not even Mexicans). We need to relook at the Oliver North period with the nightmare that we helped to cause in Central America which eventually led to the conditions that are causing people to flee.
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