Border wall far short of promise

Trump administration speeds up work, but many miles remain

At the start of each week, Border Patrol Chief Rodney Scott tweets out the progress made on the Trump administration’s border wall.

Lastweek, it read: 415miles of border wall completed. 236 under construction.

As President Donald Trump said at a news conference: “We’ll be very close to 500 miles by the end of the year.”

But what the numbers don’t show is how many new miles were built where no barrier existed before.

Of the 415miles of border wall completed, only 30 miles are in new areas, according to a Customs and Border Protection report obtained by the San Antonio Express-News. This summer, it was 5 miles. Most of the construction has replaced older fencing and vehicle barriers, largely from the El Paso area west to California.

The administration has accelerated construction this year, but the projectwill fallwell short of the president’s original promise to build awall from “sea to shining sea,” and make Mexico pay for it.

Nevertheless, the border wall has been expensive, costing nearly $15 billion for more than 730 miles of wall since Trump took office.

Almost $10 billion was diverted from Defense Department programs in 2019 and 2020, a controversial transfer of money that has been chal-

lenged in federal lawsuits.

An appeals court last week threw out one case, involving $3.6 billion. A separate case remains before the Supreme Court.

The 2021budget includes nearly $2 billion for 82 miles of border wall.

To boost construction, the administration filed some 120 lawsuits this year to survey or seize private land in Texas through condemnations, according to the Texas Civil Rights Project, which tracks lawsuits in courts along the border.

The pace picked up since July, with 47 lawsuits filed. In 2019, there only were 12 condemnation filings.

The government also has waived dozens of environmental and indigenous laws, including the Clean Air and CleanWater acts, to expedite construction.

President-elect Joe Biden has said hewill stop thewall construction, but he will inherit the contracts and long-term funding commitments approved by Congress.

The projects typically take years to complete after Congress provides the funds. More than 300 miles of approved wall projects have not been built.

Some of the outdated fencing dates tothe 2006 Secure Fence Act under the Bush administration. Construction continued when Biden was vice president from 2009 to 2016.

Border advocates hope the new administration tears down some of the wall. In lieu of a full dismantling, they’re urging the government to restore the natural habitats that were bulldozed for wall construction.

The Biden campaign did not respond to questions on how it will stop the border wall and whether it will restore some of the habitats. In Texas, border wall construction has been slow, hindered by the condemnation court cases against private landowners. The splices of wall in the Rio Grande Valley often are miles north of the actual border, which is marked by the Rio Grande.

“In Texas we’re seeing the wall go up between communities and their water source, their river, their place of recreation,” said Laiken Jordahl, a borderland campaigner for the Center for Biological Diversity. “It’s unconscionable to wall off some of the poorest communities in South Texas from nature.”

Construction is closing in on the east and west sides of the National Butterfly Center in Mission, said Marianna Treviño-Wright, the center’s executive director.

She said the wall’s lasting impact on the community and environment is yet to come.

“The Solid Waste Disposal Act has been waived, and the Clean Water Act has been waived, which means that if our children, grandchildren in the future are poisoned, we have no protections under these laws. They do not exist for us,” she said.

Two years ago, the wall plan threatened to slice through the center, putting 70 percent of its land south of the wall. U.S. Rep Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo, wrote language into an appropriations bill to protect the center, along with several other historic, indigenous or environmentally protected sites.

Treviño-Wright urged Biden to immediately cancel the wall contracts.

“Canceling is way cheaper than just allowing the contracts that had already been awarded to proceed. There’s not even a comparison” in cost, she said.

Wall construction has been more successful in places like Arizona, which has less private ranch land than Texas. There, federal contractors have been demolishing waist-high fencing that impeded cars and replacing it with 30foot steel bollards. Environmentalists say it isolates wildlife populations and puts protected species like the ocelot — a small, spotted, wild cat — in more danger of extinction.

This year, contractors bulldozed the burial site of an indigenous nation in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in Arizona.

“You can’t put an amount of money to having a sacred site destroyed, or having the bones of your ancestry unearthed, but the (Biden) government needs to engage in a good-faith dialogue and do what they can do to compensate or mitigate,” Jordahl of Center for Biological Diversity said.

“Border communities do not have the protections that every other community in America are able to enjoy.”