Eight border wall prototypes that were built in San Diego, Calif., in late 2017 will be torn down for a second barrier being built behind the main wall.
Customs and Border Protection told reporters Friday the eight barriers, which cost as much as $2.4 million to construct, will come down soon.
During a trip to the San Diego sector in October, Border Patrol agents told the Washington Examiner they would either incorporate the eight prototypes with the new barrier or take them down and just have one uniform wall.
Six companies were tasked in September 2017 with building eight prototypes. Caddell Construction Company, Fisher Sand & Gravel Company, Texas Sterling Construction Company, and W.G. Yates and Sons Construction Company built solid concrete walls, while Caddell, Yates, KWR Construction, Inc., and ELTA North America Inc. built prototypes using “alternate materials.”
Most of the initial construction cost between $350,000 to $500,000, the Washington Examiner previously reported.
On Nov. 26, 2017, CBP began its evaluation and testing phase and said it expected it would take 30 to 60 days.
The prototypes were considered based on their ability to prevent people from climbing them, breaching them, or digging under them. They are also being studied for how they are able to deter or block traffic and how agents are able to operate around them.
In March 2018, President Trump visited the prototypes. At the time, the Department of Homeland Security said no decision had been made on an official winner, adding they planned to use qualities of multiple prototypes in future wall construction.
DHS announced two weeks ago that Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen had given CBP permission to ignore environmental and land regulations to expedite construction of a secondary barrier.
The secondary wall is meant to run for 12 miles and is expected to be 18 feet tall, a sector spokesman told the Washington Examiner during a visit to the region last year.
The Army Corps of Engineers was awarded the project in December.
The San Diego Sector is unique as a southwest border sector in that it has had a double wall for two decades, but it has still seen active smuggling efforts and increased illegal immigration in recent years. Despite the double wall, people were easily getting over or through both of them, prompting the sector to step up its infrastructure.
In fiscal 2018, the Border Patrol’s San Diego Sector, one of nine on the southern border, arrested 38,000 people. In the first four months of 2019, the region has hit nearly half the total number apprehended last year.
The “primary” wall, or that which is closest to Mexico, stretches 14 miles from Imperial Beach on the Pacific Ocean past the Otay Mesa port of entry and into the mountains, where it is difficult to travel on foot or by vehicle.
The main wall was installed in 1991. It consists of thousands of 8- to 10-foot-tall corrugated steel “landing mats.” The mats were surplus material from the Vietnam War that had been meant to serve as helicopter landing pads in rice paddies.
In the early 1990s, agents were making more apprehensions of illegal entrants in their 60-mile stretch of the border than all apprehensions seen across the border last year. Prior to 1991, barbed-wire fencing was all that was stopping people from entering the country outside of a port, and it wasn’t installed continuously across the border. In 1997, San Diego began installing a secondary wall.
In 2016, San Diego learned it would receive federal funding to replace the landing mats with bollard fencing, which consists of vertical steel posts that have been planted in the ground.
It’s not clear when the prototypes will come down, but a spokesman for the San Diego sector said money to do so had already been directed toward the project.
