Workers assemble part of the border wall
DONNA — Two giant construction cranes tower over harvested sugar cane fields, topped by a pair of checkered flags flapping in the wind. At a distance along this flat, rural stretch of the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas, the two structures standing between the cranes resemble forlorn drive-in movie screens.
The twin panels of 18foot-tall steel beams do not look like much — the only signs indicating it is a construction site warn “Road Closed” and “No Trespassing” — but they were milestones of a sort.
Nearly three years after President Donald Trump took office, the two steel squares, newly installed and still incomplete about a mile north of the Rio Grande, are the first new sections to be built of the wall the president has promised to construct along the 1,900-mile Southwestern border.
More than two years ago, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began drilling and taking soil samples along the border, and work has steadily proceeded in the years since, in California, Arizona and New Mexico. But the work until now improved and replaced existing barriers. Construction on the first new section of border wall, where nothing stood previously, started just south of Donna in late October.
It began months behind schedule. It will cost about $167 million. And when it is done, this landmark section of the contentious wall project — a symbol of Trump’s presidency and a flashpoint for his critics — will extend the hard border with Mexico by just 8 miles.
There are hundreds more miles to go.
The government has been racing to meet a deadline — the president’s promise to build approximately 500 miles of border fencing by the end of 2020. According to Customs and Border Protection officials, about $9.8 billion has been set aside in funding from the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security and a Treasury Department asset-forfeiture fund.
“We think we can get it close to 500 miles by the end of next year, depending on certain terrain conditions,” Trump told reporters in September as he showed off the steel bollards recently erected near San Diego, adding, “We’re building it at breakneck speed.”
Construction of the 8 miles of wall in Donna had been scheduled to begin in February but did not fully get underway until late October. The project will take months to complete. About 30 miles west of the Donna site, near a state park, crews have cleared land in preparation for more new wall construction that, along with three other sites, constitute the work to be done in Hidalgo County.
Similar preparations are underway across other stretches of the Southwestern border.
All told, 76 miles of replacement wall have been completed along the border, federal officials said, meaning that more than 400 miles must be installed in about 60 weeks to meet the deadline.
Construction executives and those involved in construction of the previous sections of border fence built during the administration of George W. Bush said it was a tough deadline to meet but was indeed possible.
“I would’ve told you 15 years ago: ‘What are you smoking?’ ” said Victor Manjarrez Jr., a former Border Patrol sector chief in El Paso,who helped oversee the erection of the Bush-era border fence in the late 2000s. “But now, the big difference is it’s not just DoD resources. It’s contractors now who are working … a lot faster than we ever could have imagined.”
America’s southwestern border with Mexico spans four states and nearly 2,000 miles, but it has long been mostly unfenced, with barriers covering about 650 miles. Some of the controversies that delayed and complicated efforts by previous presidents to build new fencing continue to hamper the current project.
Some private landowners along the Rio Grande whose property is needed for the wall are fighting the government in court, with new lawsuits filed “all the time,” said Ricky Garza, a lawyer with the Texas Civil Rights Project. Legal challenges by landowners who objected when the Bush administration tried to build a border wall have dragged on for over a decade. As of earlier this year, there were more than 60 Bush-era cases involving landowners still pending, Garza said.
For all the public debate over the need for a wall — and the protests and congressional standoffs that accompany it — the actual construction sites have operated smoothly, with little fanfare.
Donna, a town of nearly 17,000 with a median household income of $30,000, was where Army soldiers set up a base camp last year during Trump’s troop deployment to the border. The mayor, Rick Morales, said he had no problem with the construction work.
“I do believe that there has to be some type of barrier,” Morales said. “We have a natural barrier, which is the river, but we have a lot of drug smuggling and human smuggling in this area.”
Other elected officials have been less supportive, questioning whether a wall is worth the trouble and the money. They discounted promises that the construction would bring substantial new jobs.
“We have a president that says he got elected on a promise to build a border wall,” said the top elected official in Hidalgo County, Richard Cortez, who serves as the county judge and is a Democrat. “Well, I think that we have to have better reasons to build a border wall than a campaign promise. I’d rather spend the millions on the drainage problems we have down here.”