Faith & Spirit Quote by Barry McCaffrey

"Thank God" is doing double duty here: a conventional piety that also functions as a political solvent, dissolving complexity into moral certainty. McCaffrey, a career soldier, isn’t just promising policy; he’s invoking a comforting chain of command that starts in heaven and ends at the border. That’s the specific intent: to frame border enforcement not as a contested administrative problem but as a necessary act of national defense - urgent, righteous, and beyond partisan squabbling.

The phrasing "try to continue" sounds modest, even procedural, but it’s a rhetorical feint. What follows is a hard escalation: "effectively defend our frontiers" recasts immigration and customs enforcement in the language of territorial threat. "Frontiers" is a frontier-myth word, summoning the imagined perimeter of a besieged nation rather than the messy reality of ports, paperwork, labor markets, asylum claims, and human desperation. McCaffrey’s subtext is that the border is a battlefield and the state’s legitimacy is measured by its ability to project force there.

Then comes the institutional roll call: Border Patrol, Customs, Coast Guard, Armed Forces. It’s a cadence designed to reassure the public that every instrument of state power is aligned, professional, and ready. It also quietly normalizes militarization by placing civilian agencies and the military in one seamless continuum. In context - the late-20th-century pivot toward treating drugs, migration, and transnational crime as security crises - this is the language of a nation translating anxiety into hardware and hierarchy. The quote works because it offers a clean story: danger outside, order inside, and a line held by uniforms.