President Donald Trump boasted Tuesday about the completion of “more than 200 miles of powerful border wall” with Mexico at the southern edge of Arizona. However, according to a June 19 report from Homeland Security, most of the fencing Trump put up replaced existing, outdated border walls.
Only about “three miles of new border wall system [have been] constructed in locations where no barriers previously existed,” the report reads.
The border wall, part of Trump’s original campaign promises on cracking down on illegal immigration, is nowhere near complete. The president said in Arizona that he would have “close to 500 miles” of the wall completed by the end of 2020 — far from the initial promise of a 1,954-mile border wall stretching all the way across the southern border.
The project, which has cost the Trump administration $15 billion, has not been financed at all by Mexico — another unfulfilled promise.
Acting acting commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Mark Morgan, told reporters that discussing how much of the wall is new and how much is replacing older borders creates “a false political narrative.”
“From an operational law enforcement perspective, those are new miles of wall system that are going into the ground,” Morgan said.
Trump complained on Twitter Monday: “Rather hard to believe that [*Fox News*] didn’t know that the Border Wall is well under construction, fully financed, & already over 200 miles long? Will soon be finished! They just reported that “it’s something that Dems are unlikely to budge on in this election year.”
Although immigration has dropped as a top concern for most voters amid the coronavirus pandemic and economic slowdown which has cost millions of Americans their jobs, Trump’s bragging about the wall might not be a bad campaign strategy.
“Replacing crappy, rusting 1970s barriers that are 8 feet high with 30-foot bollard wall — that’s ‘new wall,’” Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, told the Los Angeles Times. “The president has a case to make that he’s actually achieved results.”
