A crowdfunding page to raise money for a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border surged past $10 million Thursday night.
Brian Kolfage, a triple amputee veteran who served in Iraq, created the project Monday with the intent of raising $1 billion for construction of a barrier at the international boundary. The site does not state where on the 2,000-mile border a wall would be built.
As of late Thursday, more than 166,000 people had given to the campaign.
“If the 63 million people who voted for Trump each pledge $80, we can build the wall. That equates to roughly 5Billion Dollars, even if we get half, that’s half the wall. We can do this,” Kolfage wrote.
However, President Trump in January asked for $25 billion from Congress to fund a variety of border security projects, including infrastructure, technology, and additional personnel. The White House is currently fighting for $5.7 billion of funding in the Department of Homeland Security’s fiscal 2019 appropriations.
“Democrats are going to stall this project by every means possible and play political games to ensure President Trump doesn’t get his victor. They’d rather see President Trump fail, than see America succeed,” Kolfage wrote. “However, if we can fund a large portion of this wall, it will jumpstart things and will be less money Trump has to secure from our politicians.”
Kolfage vowed to return everyone’s money if they cannot reach $1 billion.
He said donors should rest assured the page is not a scam. However, Kolfage’s history on social media was called into question by an NBC News report that showed he had pushed conspiracy theories on several Facebook pages and personally operates news websites.
One page, Right Wing News, was taken down by Facebook. Kolfage then created Fight4FreeSpeech.
Another one of Kolfage’s sites, FreedomDaily, was sued by a Michigan man after it reported the wrong man’s name as the driver of a car that struck a group of people at the white supremacy rally in Charlottesville, Va., in August 2017.
He told NBC he did not mention his issues with Facebook or the lawsuit on the crowdfunding page because his “personal issues have nothing to do with building the wall.”
