Just 5 new miles of wall built in Trump’s term
President Donald Trump’s signature campaign promise to build a wall from the Gulf Coast to the Pacific has added only 5 miles of new barriers along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Since he took office in 2017, the administration has set aside $15 billion for 738 miles of walls and fencing on the 2,000-mile border, with the money coming from Department of Homeland Security, the Defense Department and the Treasury Forfeiture Fund.
The federal government has completed 260 miles of replacement and secondary walls but only 5 new miles of the 30-foothigh steel bollard fencing where none existed before, U.S. Customs and Border Protection data obtained by the San Antonio Express-News shows.
At least 3 miles of the new barrier are in the Rio Grande Valley,
near Roma. The administration also has completed 24 miles of new secondary fencing — a double barrier — and replaced 236 miles of outdated or dilapidated fencing.
Overall, the administration has allocated funding for 400 miles of replacement walls, 57 miles of new secondary fencing and 281 miles of new primary walls.
Trump “is trying to say he’s kept his campaign promise, but he’s not saying what he’s actually doing, which is just replacement sometimes of a double fence,” said U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, DLaredo.
Trump promised to build the wall and make Mexico pay for it in his 2016 campaign. A key feature in his efforts to limit immigration, the wall has proceeded slowly under congressional budget constraints and several lawsuits that sought to block construction.
Diverted funds
The administration sidestepped Congress last year and diverted more than $6 billion from the military budget and more than $600 million from the Treasury Forfeiture Fund to speed wall construction. The government said it would divert an additional $3.8 billion this year from the Defense Department.
Opponents sued to block the spending, but the Supreme Court ruled late last month that the administration can use the reprogrammed funding to continue building barriers in New Mexico, Arizona and California while a legal battle over the funds plays out in court.
Despite the administration’s efforts to build quickly, private land ownership and flood-control concerns along the Rio Grande — governed by international boundary laws — also have slowed the progress.
Most of the property targeted in Texas is in private hands. If the landowner refuses to sell, the government must survey the land before condemning it, requiring officials to file two lawsuits — to survey and to take the land.
But the government has been building walls and moving with more urgency on contracts in recent months in advance of the November election.
“A rational person would tell you after COVID-19 certain things would stop, and we thought the wall construction was going to stop. … But instead they’re pushing harder,” Cuellar said. “Are they trying to move faster? Yes, they are.”
Acting CBP Commissioner Mark Morgan said last month that the agency and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are “actually moving faster than ever” on border wall construction.
“We’re putting more wall system in place every single day than we have before. We’re now up to 265 miles. … If I checked right now, we’ve added a mile or two since I put this down in my talking points,” Morgan.
The government last week awarded Fisher Sand and Gravel $289.5 million to build 17 miles of border wall in Laredo — all on private land.
“They don’t even own the land. … Yet they are awarding hundreds of millions of valuable taxpayer dollars to contractors to come into our community and destroy something that’s irreplaceable. And that’s offensive,” said Tricia Cortez, executive director of the nonprofit Rio Grande International Study Center.
The company long has lobbied publicly for wall contracts and last year built a 3-mile steel wall on the banks of the Rio Grande near Mission to promote its design.
The wall — paid for in part by Trump supporters through the conservative nonprofit We Build the Wall’s crowdsourcing campaign — is yards from river, just south of where the federal government has plans to build its own border wall.
“It was just a billboard thrown up to advertise their services to the administration,” said Marianna Wright, executive director of the National Butterfly Center, adjacent to the private wall. “And based upon this project, they have been awarded now multiple government contracts totaling over $2 billion.”
Erosion caused by a hurricane that flooded the Rio Grande recently undermined parts of the wall, which the butterfly center had tried to block in court.
In addition to the Laredo contract, the company was awarded a $1.3 billion deal in May for 42 miles of fencing in Arizona — the largest border wall contract awarded by DHS.
Transparency questions
Contracts awarded to outspoken Trump supporters have drawn scrutiny.
“There are questions about whether it’s done correctly,” Cuellar said of the bidding process. “But the problem is, they won’t give us this information (about the contracts).”
An internal government watchdog report last month found that CBP didn’t sufficiently analyze the best methods for securing the border, instead relying on “outdated border solutions.”
“CBP has not fully demonstrated that it possesses the capability to potentially spend billions of dollars to execute a large-scale acquisition to secure the southern border,” reads the report.
It also found CBP didn’t properly analyze the locations that would be best suited for a wall.
“We think it’s a lot of political theatrics and these are just sort of PR moves that they’re making right now to make you think this is unstoppable, and this is a done deal,” said Cortez, the Laredo resident. “I think we can see right through a lot of that nonsense and we’re not buying it.”
Armed with City Council approval, residents in Laredo will be painting a “defund the wall” street mural outside the federal courthouse in the coming weeks.