The new United States-Mexico border wall is expected to have more than 100 miles built by the end of the year, as expected by the Trump administration, according to the Washington Examiner.
As reported by the Examiner’s Ken Cuccinelli, the acting deputy secretary of Homeland Security, said following the efforts of the administration, 90 miles of the border wall had already been built. By the new year, they were expected for that number to go into the 100s.
“I would expect us to be in the triple digits before we get into the new year,” Cuccinelli said, according to the Washington Examiner.
As the news outlet reported, the Trump administration had been struggling to acquire funding for the border wall, which had been one of Trump’s promises during his campaign in 2016. This, according to PBS, had been due in part because of a bill that had been passed by the Senate to restrict the use of Pentagon funds by Trump for the border wall project. However, that bill had been rejected by the President, and the Senate reportedly did not have enough votes to override the decision.
As a result, the Trump administration gained access to the pentagon funds to build the border wall project. Cuccinelli stated that once the funds were available to be used, the building of the border wall would likely be happening at a much faster pace than the current one, Washington Examiner reported.
According to the news outlet, although Cuccinelli said that there were delays at present, it wasn’t the construction that was slowing down the building of the walls.
“The hardest part of building isn’t building. It’s getting to the point where you break ground and can build,” Cuccinelli said, according to the news outlet. Despite the roadblocks, Cuccinelli said that it would be great if they were able to build the border to a total of 400 miles, and remained hopeful that would become a reality.
PBS wrote in the earlier report that it was necessary to apply different kinds of border walls because although there did exist border barriers, they aren’t enough. Despite fencing the border off even further, there were other ways to keep immigrants from illegally gaining access to the United States. Different kinds of fencing need to be in place to slow the number of illegal immigrants to a manageable amount so that the border agents were able to get to the illegal immigrants before they gain access to the country.
According to the news outlet, double barriers—or two layers of barriers were effective in urban areas where much of the illegal immigration traffic comes from. Illegal immigrants have to overcome two layers of barriers before they gain access to the country, and this would give border patrol agents more time to pick the immigrants who illegally enter the United States, PBS reported. This would all be happening before the illegal immigrants got to the second fence.
