The wall erected at the U.S.’s southern border under the direction of former President Donald Trump has been broken through thousands of times since it was put up, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post.
According to unpublished U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, supposed “smuggling gangs” from Mexico, as the Post wrote, have sawed through the wall 3,272 times between 2019 and 2021.
This means that the wall, which Trump has previously referred to as a “Rolls-Royce” that is “virtually impenetrable,” has been breached at a rate of about three times a day at a minimum for the past three years.
The fact that the structure can be sawed through so easily indicates that the wall is extremely ineffective even in its racist, xenophobic goal of keeping Mexican people and asylum seekers out of the United States.
The wall has cost the government $15 billion as of October 2020 and can be easily penetrated with simple power tools that are commonly found at retail hardware stores, like angle grinders or demolition saws. Over the past three years, the government has spent $2.6 million repairing these breaches.
Contractors are supposed to fill the bottom parts of the wall’s bollards with concrete or steel rebar in order to prevent further breaches, but the Post found that several bollards were left hollow. In 2019, after reporters discovered that the wall was being broken through, Trump appeared to renege on his claims that the wall was impenetrable.
In some places, people breaking through the wall will disguise the breach with putty. If border agents don’t notice the breach, people can return to the same place over and over in order to cross through the wall. In other places, bollards have been sawed and swung back into their original position, obscuring the fact that they’re broken.
The fact that breaches can be obscured suggests that there could be even more than the thousands of breaches that CBP has recorded.
About 458 miles of the wall has been built under Trump’s direction; he ultimately planned to continue constructing the wall for another 250 miles. President Joe Biden stopped construction of the wall, and his administration has called on Congress to cancel remaining border funding. Some observers who have traveled to the southern border say, however, that CBP is still constructing the wall there. The agency says that the construction is for flood control and to protect border agents.
The wall can also be circumvented in other ways, HuffPost pointed out. Previous reporting has found that people are using $5 ladders to climb over the wall. “It’s made of cheap, rough wood, quickly nailed together because it is only going to be used once,” local artist and activist Scott Nicol told Texas Monthly last April. “Unlike the wall, these ladders are functional.”
Another instance in 2020 demonstrated seemingly shoddy construction of the wall. A segment of the California side of the wall fell onto some trees on the Mexican side after the area experienced winds that were up to 37 miles an hour.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
