The Department of Homeland Security marked the official start of construction on President Trump’s promised border wall Monday at a groundbreaking ceremony less than 10 miles west of El Paso, Texas.
“The president has started his project,” El Paso Sector Chief Patrol Agent Aaron E. Hull told reporters during a press conference at the border in Santa Teresa, N.M. “This project is underway. This is the beginning, in this sector, of the president’s border wall.”
The 20-mile Santa Teresa project will replace three-foot-tall posts and a taller mesh fence with 18- to 30-foot walls made primarily of concrete.
The wall’s steel structure will stretch six feet under ground and be fastened into two feet of concrete beneath. The portion of the wall that is above ground and visible will have a five-foot plate at the top that will deter people from scaling it.
“It is going to deter all but the most determined illegal entrants from entering the United States here,” Hull said. “It is going to make it harder to cross for illegal aliens. It’s going to make it harder for smugglers and border criminals to move freely between the two countries as they do now.”
Santa Teresa is one of four sections of the border that DHS agency Customs and Border Protection announced in late March will replace and build new barriers.
The $73 million operation was funded through the $1.6 billion Congress gave Customs and Border Protection in the omnibus last month.
“This part of the Santa Teresa area of operations is our busiest area for illegal alien apprehensions and it has been for years. It’s also a prime corridor for the smuggling of narcotics,” Hull added. “The wall that we’re going to put in here is going to serve as an effective barrier to both. It’s going to allow us to make more effective use of our agents and our technology.”
Existing barriers were meant to prevent vehicles from driving off-road to cross the border. Hull noted the mesh barrier was expensive and time-consuming for agents to repair.
Hull said the new wall, which had a little more than a mile built as a test last year, has already proven durable.
“We’ve got a 1.3-mile section of this bollard wall that we put in last year. We are very pleased with the outcome. It is safer, and it’s durable. The proximity to the highway has resulted in this wall being run into on a couple of occasions by vehicles, and in one case, a five-ton truck. The capability of that bollard wall to sustain that impact is a testament to the money well spent to secure the border,” he said.
The project is scheduled to be completed by next March.
CBP wants an additional 1,000 miles of new fencing and said the $25 billion Trump requested in January would be enough to get all of it built.
