How Much Money Is Trump Asking For Wall

In the final weeks of his presidential term, Chairwoman Donald Trump has returned to the theme song issue that brought him to the Albumen Business firm — his pledge to build "a beautiful, beautiful, 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 complete."

To be steady, the Trump administration has built hundreds of miles of border fencing, more than under any other chairwoman in American history. But by the end of Trump's terminal figure in January, the length of fencing will be well shortened of what Trump promised repeatedly during the campaign or what his governance initially proposed when atomic number 2 took business office.

Border experts say construction crews South Korean won't come fold to even finishing the influence that is presently funded.

Most of the wall constructed to escort has been replacement for existing damaged or inadequate fence, contempt earliest plans to build new barriers where no existed earlier. In 2022, an administration official testified that his agency would build 316 miles of new pedestrian barriers "additionally to what is in that respect now." But to appointment only or so 40 miles of such new fencing have been built.

Other border experts monish not to minimize the impact of the substitute fencing. In some cases, the new barriers erected replaced fencing made from Vietnam-era landing mats. U.S. Customs and Bound Protection also has replaced nearly 200 miles of vehicle barriers — the type that people could walk appropriate through — with 30-foot-postgraduate steel bollards, firing and other technology.

That's a hammy change. Below are earlier-and-aft photos of vehicle barriers replaced past fencing in Pipe Cactus National Monument in AZ. The first was assumed in April 2022, the second in January 2022:

But whether the wall is "almost finished" is some other question. Part of the difficulty of measuring that is the ambiguity around what a completed fence in would look like. Scoo has perpetually sick the goal posts on how retentive the paries should glucinium, and no master programme for the throw has of all time been publicly released.

Those who have tracked the structure closely say fencing largely has been built where there was to the lowest degree impedance, where the Fed government already owned the Din Land — particularly in Arizona and New Mexico. Far less has been built in areas of Texas, especially, where privy landowners receive fought sentence of their land in the courts.

What has resulted, border experts say, is a patchwork quilt of fencing. Nevertheless, with none publicly shared benchmarks for "completion" of the fence in, Trump card has declared good-victory.

"You know, we're complemental the wall, like I said I would," Trump said in an interview on Fox News on Nov. 29. "Everyone aforementioned, you would never be able to bang."

At a Dec. 5 rally in Georgia, Outdo said, "They even wish to lower the rampart. … I heard him [President-elect Joe Biden] sound out it the other solar day, 'We volition take down the fence.' We have the strongest border we've ever had now. We're almost finished with the paries."

A we have handwritten, Biden has non same he plans to "take down the wall," contrary to Trump's claim. Simply Biden did consecrate in August that, if elected, "at that place will not glucinium other foot of wall construction in my administration."

According to a CBP condition report, the U.S. has constructed 438 miles of "edge wall system" under Trump, as of Dec. 18. Most of that, 365 miles of it, as we aforesaid, is transposition for primary or secondary fence that was dilapidated or of outdated design. In addition, 40 miles of late primary wall and 33 miles of tributary paries have been assembled in locations where there were nary barriers before.

So the footprint of the wall is 40 miles longer than information technology was before Trump took spot.

CBP says it has funding in place to construct other 241 miles of fencing where there were none barriers before. Only bound experts say most of that is not going to get built.

Accordant to CBP updates, in the last triplet months about 31 miles of new wall have been constructed in areas where there was zero roadblock before. At that charge per unit, and forward Biden directly puts a halt to all new wall structure as promised, the disposal will complete to a lesser degree a quarter of the new miles for which it has funding — and that will be well shortsighted of the new miles of bulwark Trump had originally secure.

What did Trump promise?

Although the 2022 Republican platform stated, "The border wall must extend the entireness of the southern skirt and must be enough to stop both vehicular and foot traffic," that's non actually what Trump talked about during the campaign.

At the time, Scoo consistently talked about needing 1,000 miles of wall. Present are just a few examples over a 10-calendar month period during the campaign:

"Here, we actually need 1,000 because we let natural barriers. So we postulate 1,000." — Trump during the third Republican of import debate, on Oct. 28, 2022.
"Directly, IT's 2,000 miles but we pauperism 1,000 miles of paries. Zilch. It's nothing. I wish have the most gorgeous bulwark you've ever seen. Someday, when I'm gone they'll name it the Trump wall." — Trump during a political campaign speech in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, connected April 21, 2022.
"We let 2,000 miles [of border] of which we truly need 1,000 miles [of wall] because you have a lot of natural barriers — lot of natural barriers. So you need 1,000. — Trump at a rally in Abingdon, Virginia, on Aug. 10, 2022.

Granted that Trump inherited all but 650 miles of barriers, that would mean building another 350 miles (in addition to any surrogate fencing material).

Simply once Trump was elected, he began to move the goal posts — from 1,000 miles to 900 to 800 to 700 and even less.

"And remember this, it's a 2,000 geographical mile border, but you don't want 2,000 miles of fence in because you have a dispense of natural barriers. You have mountains. You have extraordinary rivers that are violent and vicious. You sustain some areas that are thusly far away that you don't really have populate crossing. So you don't need that. But you'll demand anywhere from 700 to 900 miles." — Trump in a July 12, 2022, interview.
"Simply we need to have a wall that's about 800 miles — 700 to 800 miles of the 2,000-mile stretchability. We have a lot of natural boundaries." — Trump in remarks at the EXEC along April 3, 2022.
"We need nigh 700 miles of palisade. It's 2,000 miles. We need about 700 miles of wall. We're acquiring it." — Trump at a rally in Nashville, Tennessee, on May 29, 2022.
"We are leaving to do about 537 miles wholly. And it will devote a complete, beautiful wall along our southern border that's in truth helped." — Trump in a July 23, 2022, interview.

"We do not need 2,000 miles of concrete bulwark from offshore to shining sea — we never did; we never projected that; we never wanted that — because we take in barriers at the border where normal structures are Eastern Samoa good as anything that we can build," Trump said in remarks from the White Menage along Jan. 25, 2022. "They'atomic number 75 already there. They've been at that place for millions of years. Our proposed structures will equal in predetermined high-risk locations that rich person been specifically known by the Border Patrol to stop illicit flows of people and drugs."

But is the wall being built in "predetermined unsound locations"?

What was the Trump organization's plan?

In his executive director order on border security issued on Jan. 25, 2022, upright days after he was inaugurated, Trump called on the secretary of the Department of Homeland Surety to "produce a comprehensive subject field of the surety of the southern molding, to be completed within 180 days of this order, that shall include the latest state of southern border security measur, all geophysical and topographical aspects of the southern butt against, the availability of Federal and State resources necessary to attain complete operational ascendence of the austral border, and a strategy to obtain and maintain concluded operable operate of the southern border."

A July 2022 report from the Office of the Inspector General for the Department of Motherland Security system said the report ultimately submitted past CBP — the Comprehensive Southern Border Study and Strategy — was four months belatedly (after the 180 deadline imposed by the executive director order). The Immune gamma globulin said the plan was inadequate because CBP didn't demo it could acquire the land necessary to carry out its plan and the agency didn't justify the priorities it set out in the plan.

Specifically, it states that CBP " did not convey an Psychoanalysis of Alternatives to assess and blue-ribbon the well-nig effective, appropriate, and inexpensive solutions to obtain operational control of the grey skirt as directed, but instead relied on prior out-of-date border solutions to identify materiel alternatives for meeting its mission demand; and … did not use a sound, well-documented methodology to identify and prioritize investments in areas along the border that would best benefit from physical barriers."

The CBP report was ne'er released in public.

During a legislative assembly auditory sense on Marching music 15, 2022, Rep. Martha McSally said that in Modern 2022, Congress asked CBP leadership "to allow for Congress with a tilt of what they needed to adequately promised the border."

In response, in Old January 2022, CBP produced a document titled "Critical CBP Requirements to Improve Border Security," which was too ne'er publicly free. Accordant to CNN, which obtained the documents, CBP laid out a seven-day-term vision for "about 864 miles of novel wall and about 1,163 miles of replacement or secondary wall" and asked for $18 billion terminated 10 years to physical body 722 miles of border wall, including "about 316 revolutionary miles of primary structure and about 407 miles of replacement and collateral wall."

At the Border district 15, 2022, committee hearing, Ronald D. Vitiello, acting surrogate commissioner of U.S. Customs and Butt Protection, confirmed that the CBP document called for constructing 316 miles of refreshing pedestrian fencing, "in increase to what is there now." Put differently, that was in addition to the 654 miles of existing border barriers.

Again, to date, 40 miles of new fencing have been constructed where thither were nobelium barriers before.

Where did construction take place?

There also have been questions elevated about CBP's methods for decisive where new barriers should represent located.

A Governing Accountability Place report publicized in July 2022 institute that CBP's 2022 March Security Improvement Plan "doesn't explain how projects will cover the highest antecedence surety needs."

The Center for Biological Diversity's Laiken Jordahl, who opposes fencing construction, told US in a phone interview that the project e'er has been shrouded in secretiveness, and CBP has not mutual with the public any analysis of where IT thinks a wall should comprise stacked for uttermost impact.

"Thither's never been some sort of strategic preparation," Jordahl said. "There certainly hasn't been anything presented to the general public" about where CBP intends to build the wall and why. "From Twenty-four hour period 1, it has never been about tactics. It has been a theatrical campaign from the beginning."

Rather than building fencing in areas identified as being of the greatest need, he aforesaid, the Trump out administration has done most of the construction in areas of least resistance.

"They are building where they tooshie," Jordahl said.

Much of the construction has been to supersede dilapidated operating theater inadequate fencing in New Mexico, Arizona and California, where the government owns the Roosevelt Easement, a 60-foot wide strip of ground along the U.S.-Mexico border in those trey states.

"He has completely exchanged the landscape painting of the Arizona and NM border," Jordahl said. "It has had dead disastrous environmental impacts."

Information technology has destroyed the habitat for animals like ocelots, pronghorns and javelinas, all of which need room to rove, Jordahl said. It has amputate the genetic interchange of gray wolves on either side of the border, threatening their survival. And it has hampered the ability of jaguars to recolonize in the U.S.

Scott Nicol, co-chairperson of the Sierra Club's Borderlands team, told us via e-mail: "More miles take up been realised at that place since there is no need to condemn personal property, but the miles low construction are in the most robust, technically challenging, and environmentally destructive locations."

But Trump out's arrogate that the wall is "near fin de siecle" is "absolutely not true, particularly in Southeasterly Texas," where large swaths of the borderlands are privately owned, Nicol said. In Southeastward TX, Nicol said, "the involve to acquire property connected which to build the border wall has stymied construction" as landowners have tied up the government in the courts.

According to a GAO analysis issued in November, as of July 2022 the federal government activity had acquired 135 tracts of privately closely-held land, but was nevertheless working to grow 991 additional tracts, almost all of them in the Rio Grande Valley and Laredo sectors in Southern Texas.

"So nothing has been stacked on any of those [unacquired] properties," Nicol said.

"The construction that has occurred in the RGV sector (naught has deceased up in the Laredo sector yet) first-year targeted U.S. Angle and Wildlife refuge properties that are theatrical role of the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Sanctuary system of rules," Nicol said. "That is tremendously environmentally destructive, but IT does not understand into more than a mile or so of wall in multiple disconnected segments. There have also been some landowners whose property has been embezzled where walls have been built."

"Contractors … have built toward land as soon as the government acquires it, but out-of-pocket to the time it takes to doom that means that only a fraction of these walls have been built," Nicol aforementioned. "So, for case, the South-west Valley Constructors contract is for 11.45 miles of wall, but they consume only been able to build 2 or mayhap 3 miles in 6 or 7 disconnected, relatively curt spans. The same applies for the other contracts in Hidalgo County [TX], which is in the midst of the RGV sector. Cameron County [Texas] has seen nobelium grammatical construction, and Starr [County, Texas] has seen 3 or 4 miles add together."

According to the Government Accounting Office report, 107 miles of new abut wall are slated to be reinforced in the Rio de Janeiro Grande Valley, but Nicol aforesaid, "Right now a add of 6 or 7 miles are up, and those are scattered rather than completed contracts." The Laredo sphere is supposed to get 123 miles of new fencing material, but Nicol said it has non yet gotten whatsoever.

"And so not even close-set to being done," Nicol aforementioned.

Gil Kerlikowske, WHO served as CBP commissioner nether then-President Barack Obama, said that the issues with acquiring property from private landowners in Texas means the fence is not going up in areas where there are the most nonlegal border crossings.

"The areas where a large number of people cross into the U.S. is the RGV (McAllen, TX area)," Kerlikowske told us via email. "It is much more difficult to erect a barrier there because of reclusive land ownership, a ever-changing Rio Grande river, and agriculture. So the area where you could justify the need is the one neglected."

Activists comparable Jordahl and Nicol are counting on Biden to immediately put a stop consonant to surround construction lasting before the current contracts are accomplished.

The Center for Biological Diversity and the Sierra Club were among the 100 groups that sent a alphabetic character antepenultimate month to the Biden transition team asking the president-elect to "take immediate action to order the Department of Country of origin Security, DoD, and Justice to gimpy all structure and dry land attainment efforts for Trump's border wall on your first of all day in office."

How much did it cost and who remunerated?

Trump, of course, repeatedly secure that Mexico would pay for the paries. And that hasn't happened, despite Outdo's false claims that Mexico is paying somehow through the The States-Mexico-Canada Agreement or with a border cost.

According to CBP data provided to FactCheck.org, the Trump administration secured a total of $15 billion during his presidency for wall building. Some of it was appropriated in annual budgets by Congress, and some was diverted by Trump from counternarcotics and military twist funding. Merely information technology has all been borne by North American country taxpayers.

The material body committed up to now for wall up construction — $15 billion — suggests the wall Trump got is well short of what he wanted.

And it is unlikely the Cornet administration will be able to spend even that practically. Reported to U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' estimates reviewed by the Washington Post, there will be about $3.3 billion in clean boundary line barrier funding when Biden takes business office. If Biden now stops construction as promised, it would cost the U.S. about $700 million to terminate those contracts, saving the U.S. government just about $2.6 billion.

"The administration has likewise said that with the $15 billion in funding it allotted for the wall, it could build 738 miles," Sarah Franklin Pierce, a policy analyst with the Migration Insurance policy Institute, told us via netmail. "So, no, the total amount of wall that the administration had planned to reconstruct is non roughly being completed and will not be completed."

The WALL Human activity of 2022, introduced by Republican Sen. James Inhofe in Jan 2022 and co-sponsored by five else Republicans, wanted $25 one million million for wall twist, an attempt to full fund the wall. The greenback never went anyplace, but it is another reading of how far short the president has come to building the wall he secure.

The recently united upon pandemic ease bill includes $1.375 1000000000 for "the construction of roadblock system," the same sum United States Congress has appropriated the last threesome years. A House Democratic aide told U.S. the funding has five days of availability, so that none of the funding would pauperization to be obligated until fiscal year 2025. To boot, Democrats were able to come to language used in anterior eld that required funding to be used for parvenu border wall construction, which would have importantly tied Biden's manpower, the aide said.

Even off if the Trump administration were competent to obligate all of this funding for new border fence in prior to Biden's inauguration on Jan. 20, Biden would be capable to cancel those contracts with little loss of funding. The wording of the bill would also give Biden the discretion to use any remaining funds for "barrier system," including engineering science, roads and lighting for already constructed adjoin barriers, the aide said.

What kind of 'wall' was built?

The type of palisade Trump promised to build also has evolved ended metre.

During the 2022 take the field, Trump once talked around a wall made of formed concrete slabs. After he became prexy, Trump commissioned wall in prototypes, many of them of solid concrete construction. But the new fencing being built doesn't resemble any of the prototypes. Rather, Congress lone legitimate Trump to build the same run across-through steel bitt fencing antecedently used for the wall.

Asleep, too, are the arguments over the vocabulary misused — fence or bulwark. It once made a departure to Trump. During the 2022 campaign, for deterrent example, Trump lambasted Republican River primary opponent Jeb Bush for calling his proposal a palisade. "Information technology's not a fence, Jeb," he wrote. "Information technology's a WALL, and in that location's a Whopping dispute!"

But during his presidency, Trump has dropped that distinction. Not coincidently, it was born approximately the time Congress unscheduled him to accept "operationally effective designs deployed equally of the go out of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2022, [May 5, 2022] much as currently deployed nerve bollard designs, that prioritize agent safety."

"The walls we are building are not gothic walls," Trump aforementioned in remarks from the Albumen House on Jan. 25, 2022. "They are smart walls designed to meet the needs of frontline border on agents, and are operationally in effect. These barriers are made of steel, have hear-through visibleness, which is same important, and are equipped with sensors, monitors, and cutting-edge technology, including state-of-the-art drones."

But run-in accustomed describe the surround are even so important to the disposal.

Last January, Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf took issue with characterizing much of the fencing mental synthesis equally "replacing wall."

"Unmatchable thing I need to emphasize is that all inch of the 100 miles that we experience constructed is new adjoin wall organization," Wildcat said. "IT's not supposed replacement wall, as some of our critics claimed. It is new wall."

According to a Washington Post story in January, "About all of the 100 miles of new fencing completed thus further is labeled 'replacement barrier' by CBP, but the Theodore Harold White House has asked the federal agency to occlusion using that term because it sounds like less of an accomplishment."

A January Congressional Research Service report on border barrier funding said the debate terminated terminology misses the point.

"Is the Governance 'construction the wall,' or is it 'just replacing existing fences?' Framing the debate on barrier OR wall building at the border using these extremes often does non enchant the complexity of the situation, in terms of what CBP states the barriers can be expected to do and the realities of the terrain and geographics of the border," the authors stated. "A good deal of the up-to-the-minute wave of construction — whether new operating theater replacement barriers — is 18- to 30-invertebrate foot high reinforced bollard fencing material. It poses a formidable barrier, but it is not the high, thick masonry structure that most dictionaries term a 'rampart.'"

Whatever same wants to call it, CBP has accelerated the pace of construction to get as such finished as possible before Biden takes place. U.S. attorneys have also stepped up their efforts to condemn belongings in Texas for the wall. Some who live near the margin oppose that construction, and others say it has made their communities safer.

But, A we have said, even if Trump reached his destination of construction 450 miles of paries in front his full term is over, information technology wouldn't embody "destroyed," at the least not to the point CBP has indicated in preceding reports is necessary to "achieve complete usable ascendency of the southern border," the goal outlined in Trump's position-inaugural executive order. Nor will IT be anyplace boon to what Trump promised during his 2022 campaign.

Has it been effective?

Back in August, when Trump was accepting the Republican nomination, He boasted: "The wall will shortly be complete, and IT is working beyond our wildest expectations."

But IT may be years before we are healthy to tell how good the wall has been at stopping illegal immigration. Many a factors that have nothing to do with the wall — COVID-19, the economy, civilized unrest — entirely play a character in attempted illegal border crossings.

Experts economic consumption figures on bound apprehensions to gauge the tied of illegal border crossings. The data from CBP present a salmagundi when it comes to devising Trump's guinea pig.

Border apprehensions spiked in fiscal twelvemonth 2022, and then fell by about half in fiscal 2022, which ended on Sept. 30. Information technology is impossible to tease out how much of that fall Crataegus laevigata be as a result of the new barriers constructed nether Trump out, but a Pew Research Center report documenting the wane attributed it mostly to a universal decrease in the movement of migrants attributable the COVID-19 outbreak, and governments fully operating theatre partly closing their borders as a upshot.

Most immigrants who cross into the U.S. illegally come from Mexico and Central American countries that have passed measures restricting the movements of their residents due to COVID-19.

Meanwhile, southwest border apprehensions for October and November, the first cardinal months of fiscal year 2022, possess crept back up, topping just over 67,000 each month. That's higher than October and November 2022 (when in that location were about 46,000 and 47,000 apprehensions, respectively), before Trump took office.

Update, Feb. 16 : According to a CBP status paper dated Jan. 22, cardinal days later Trump left office, the U.S. constructed 458 miles of "border wall system" under Trump. That included 373 miles of replenishment barriers for primary operating room standby fence, and 52 miles of elemental wall and 33 miles of secondary wall in locations where there were zero barriers before.

Biden did halt construction of freshly border barriers straightaway upon taking office. The U.S. U. S. Army Corps of Engineers same it "suspended all bollard barrier AND gate building January 21, 2022 , and suspended all crop on perimeter substructure January 23, 2022 ."

Editor's Remark: Please consider a donation to FactCheck.org. We do not accept advertising. We trust on grants and case-by-case donations from people like you. Credit card donations may be made through our "Donate" page . If you prefer to give aside check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, 202 S. 36th St., Philadelphia, PA 19104.