Donald Trump Promised To Build A 1,000-Mile Border Wall — After 30 Months, He Still Has 1,000 Miles To Go
Donald Trump promised repeatedly during the 2016 campaign that if elected he would build a concrete wall that would stretch for 1,000 miles along the U.S.-Mexico border.
After his first 30 months in office, Trump still has exactly 1,000 miles to go.
As the Washington Examiner reported, the Trump administration has not installed a single mile of a new wall along the border despite the wall being one of the chief campaign promises in 2016. The federal agency that oversees the construction of wall and fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, confirmed to the newspaper this week that the only construction that has taken place since Trump took office in January 2017 has been to replace the existing fence. Not a single mile of new wall has been built.
The report added that none of the construction on a new border wall is even slated to take place.
“The agency said that it had built 51 miles of steel bollard fence with funding that was set aside during fiscal 2017 and 2018. But while the funding was meant both to replace outdated walls and to place barriers where there previously had been none, the government has only completed the replacement projects,” the report noted.
“The projects to secure areas with no fence are still in the works.”
The report went on to add that the Trump administration has installed an average of 1.7 miles of new border wall per month, and all of it has been in areas where a border barrier already existed before Trump took office.
Ted Cruz: El Chapo's $12.6B fortune should fund Trump's border wall https://t.co/UQhxJZ1iYV via @FoxBusiness pic.twitter.com/lKcUgkkaE9
— Yahoo Finance (@YahooFinance) July 18, 2019
Donald Trump has come under fire for walking back many of the promises he made during the 2016 campaign regarding the border wall. As USA Today noted, Trump originally claimed that the border wall would be 1,000 miles long and made from concrete.
“They built the Great Wall of China. That’s 13,000 miles. Here, we actually need 1,000 because we have natural barriers. So we need 1,000,” Trump said before an audience of millions during the third Republican debate.
Trump has since shifted the definition a number of times, saying it would be fencing instead of a concrete wall.
Trump has also walked back promises that he would make Mexico pay for the wall. Trump has shifted to demand that Democrats in Congress authorize funding to build the wall, even shutting down the government late last year in a bid to force them into authorizing the funding. Democrats held firm in their opposition, and Trump eventually ended the shutdown and declared a state of emergency so he could reallocate funding to start building the wall.
