Trump’s Border Wall: Where Does It Stand?
In the final weeks of his presidency, President Donald Trump has returned to the signature issue that brought him to the White House — his pledge to build “a beautiful, gorgeous, big wall” on the southern border. On two separate occasions, Trump has said he is “completing the wall, like I said I would” and that it is “almost finished.”
To be sure, the Trump administration has built hundreds of miles of border fencing, more than under any other president in American history. But by the end of Trump’s term in January, the length of fencing will be well short of what Trump promised repeatedly during the campaign or what his administration initially proposed when he took office.
Border experts say construction crews won’t come close to even finishing the work that is currently funded.
Most of the wall constructed to date has been replacement for existing dilapidated or inadequate fencing, despite earlier plans to build new barriers where none existed before. In 2018, an administration official testified that his agency would build 316 miles of new pedestrian barriers “in addition to what is there now.” But to date only about 40 miles of such new fencing have been built.
Other border experts warn not to minimize the impact of the replacement fencing. In some cases, the new barriers erected replaced fencing made from Vietnam-era landing mats. U.S. Customs and Border Protection also has replaced nearly 200 miles of vehicle barriers — the type that people could walk right through — with 30-foot-high steel bollards, lighting and other technology.
That’s a dramatic change. Below are before-and-after photos of vehicle barriers replaced by fencing in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in Arizona. The first was taken in April 2019, the second in January 2020:
But whether the wall is “almost finished” is another question. Part of the difficulty of measuring that is the ambiguity around what a completed wall would look like. Trump has constantly moved the goal posts on how long the wall should be, and no master plan for the project has ever been publicly released.
Those who have tracked the construction closely say fencing mostly has been built where there was least resistance, where the federal government already owned the land — particularly in Arizona and New Mexico. Far less has been built in areas of Texas, especially, where private landowners have fought condemnation of their land in the courts.
What has resulted,
