Barriers at the Southwest border were never a contentious issue until Donald Trump descended on the escalator at Trump Tower to announce his candidacy in June 2015. Ever since, though, “the wall” has become a litmus test for both major political parties (while escalators have become political symbols). In the waning days of the Biden administration, a new (sad) chapter in this saga is being written as unused fence panels have gone up for sale just in time for the holiday season.
Chapter 1: The Prelude. Prior to the 2016 presidential campaign, the erection of barriers — including fences — and infrastructure along the Southwest border was a relatively bipartisan affair.
It all started in 1993 when the then-Border Patrol Chief in the El Paso Sector, Silvestre Reyes, repaired a dilapidated fence in that Texas border city’s downtown, and extended it outward as part of “Operation Hold the Line”.
In assessing that operation in 1995, the Center explained:
The El Paso Border Patrol sector, under the supervision of Chief Silvestre Reyes, proved that illegal immigration could be effectively deterred by a preventative deployment of agents along the border. ... By mobilizing his sector's resources along the border around the clock, he converted what had been a widely breached border river and fence between the busy cities of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, into an effective deterrent. The apprehension data show a precipitous drop from the outset of the operation.
Reyes rode his success as Border Patrol chief in El Paso to the U.S. House of Representatives, where he served as a Democrat from 1997 until he was defeated for reelection in the primary by Robert “Beto” O’Rourke in May 2012.
Reyes’s successful model was soon adopted as part of “Operation Gatekeeper” in San Diego sector, which according to CBP’s website “accounted for more than half of illegal entries” at the time.
An October 2019 op-ed in the Washington Post explained that Operation Gatekeeper “was a massive undertaking, involving the construction of walls and fences along parts of the border that were easier to cross”. And once it was fully implemented, illegal crossings in the once busy sector dropped by 75 percent.
Chapter 2: The Secure Fence Act of 2006. After assessing the success of barriers in deterring illegal migration, Congress in September 2006 passed the “Secure Fence Act of 2006” (SFA), significantly expanding the construction of fencing along the Southwest border.
Then-Sen. Joe Biden joined 79 of his colleagues (including his future boss, then-Sen. Barack Obama) in voting in favor of the SFA. He was not alone – 64 Democrats in the House did the same.
Not only did Biden support the SFA, he used it as a key taking point in his ill-fated campaign for president in 2008, telling a crowd in South Carolina in November 2006: “Folks, I voted for a fence. I voted unlike some Democrats — you probably won’t like — I voted for 700 miles of fence”.
In fact, while most of the infrastructure required by that legislation was completed under the Bush administration, the “Obama-Biden” team built an additional 130 miles of the walls and fencing it authorized. By October 2014, 653 miles of fencing along the Southwest border was already in place.
Chapter Three: “Build the Wall”. Bipartisan support for border barriers quickly dissipated after Donald Trump started running for president in 2016, but he actually began talking about building a border wall during a New Hampshire speech in April 2014, long before he announced his candidacy.
The construction of a border wall was the immigration centerpiece of Trump’s border promises during the 2016 campaign, and as the Christian Science Monitor explained in October 2016, it was a flashpoint for his opponents:
In a presidential election campaign unlike any in US history, Trump’s Wall looms large. At this point it is merely a proposal, yet the very idea of it has split the American public, offended Mexico ... and drawn a razor-sharp contrast between Mr. Trump and Democratic rival Hillary Clinton on the thorny issue of illegal immigration.
Democrats’ ire over the issue didn’t dissipate after he won the election the next month, with then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi asserting in April 2017: “The wall is, in my view, immoral, expensive, unwise, and when the president says, ‘Well, I promised a wall during my campaign.' I don’t think he said he was going to pass billions of dollars of cost of the wall on to the taxpayer.”
Chapter 4: The “Shutdown”. All of this came to a head in December 2018, after newly resurgent Democrats bucked a Trump demand for $5 billion for border construction. That triggered a weeks-long government shutdown that ended on February 15, 2019, when the president agreed to $1.375 billion for border-barrier funding.
That day, though, he also issued a proclamation declaring a national emergency at the Southwest border and directing the Department of Defense (DoD) to assist in securing that border.
Ten days later, DHS asked DoD for assistance in constructing “fences[,] roads, and lighting” within 11 specified project areas, “to block drug-smuggling corridors across the international boundary between the United States and Mexico”. That construction was in addition to the $1.375 billion that Congress had appropriated for border-wall funding.
The reprogramming of DoD funds for fence and infrastructure construction went through various legal actions but was eventually allowed to proceed by the Supreme Court.
Chapter 5: The 2020 Campaign. Not surprisingly, given the divisiveness of the issue and the fact that consistency in politics is rarely a virtue, then-candidate Joe Biden publicly opposed Trump’s border infrastructure efforts in the run-up to the 2020 election.
On his campaign website, Biden asserted: “A wall is not a serious deterrent for sophisticated criminal organizations that employ border tunnels, semi-submersible vessels, and aerial technology to overcome physical barriers at the border — or even for individuals with a reciprocating saw.”
Note, however, that even though “the wall” was a major point of disagreement between Republicans and Democrats in that election, additional funding of $1.375 billion “for the construction of [a] barrier system along the southwest border” was included in both the appropriations bills for FY 2020 and for FY 2021.
Chapter 6: The “Pause”. In a fit of pique after narrowly winning election in 2020, now-President Joe Biden issued a proclamation “pausing” construction of barriers along the Southwest border on the day that he took office, January 20, 2021 — despite the fact that funds already been appropriated for that project remained unspent.
My colleague Todd Bensman was on the border the day construction stopped, January 27. His reporting includes pictures of immobile backhoes, partially completed foundations, and vast quantities of “materiel left behind in the desert” including “thousands of wall panels”. The fencing that had already been erected simply ended in the middle of nowhere.
In response, in March 2021, 40 Republican senators wrote to the head of the Government Accountability Office, Comptroller General Gene Dodaro, asking for an opinion on the legality of the January 20 proclamation.
They contended Biden’s pause was an “impoundment of funds" in violation of the Impoundment Control Act (ICA), because funding had been appropriated for those barriers, but not obligated for construction.
In a decision issued three months later, Dodaro concluded the proclamation did not violate the ICA, holding:
Funds appropriated to DHS in fiscal year 2021 for border barriers have not yet been obligated because DHS must first comply with environmental, procurement, and other statutory prerequisites prior to obligating these funds for new projects. ... Delays in the obligation and expenditure of funds in these circumstances are programmatic delays, not impoundments.
Chapter 7: Plugging the Gaps. If you had ventured to the Southwest border during the next two years, you likely would have seen what Bensman saw the day the pause took effect: stumps where light towers should have been; electrical boxes unhooked from power sources; partially finished (and degrading) roads; and miles of fence panels stacked up seven feet high. Only the backhoes were gone.
You can’t hide images like that forever, but it was still somewhat of a surprise in July 2022 when the Biden administration announced it would resume — on a limited basis — border infrastructure projects to plug “gaps” in the unfinished wall in Yuma, Ariz.
Why Yuma and why then? As my colleague Mark Krikorian explained in an op-ed that next month, it was just:
a cosmetic gesture driven by the upcoming elections — specifically, the re-election campaign of Sen. Mark Kelly, a Democrat from Arizona. In a 50-50 Senate, every seat up for election counts. If Republicans manage a net gain of just one seat in the upper house, Biden’s plans to appoint judges, and perhaps even another Supreme Court justice, will be significantly complicated, if not scuttled altogether.
In other words, plugging the Yuma gaps was necessary because the voters in Arizona understood what the rest of their fellow Americans were only beginning to realize: The border was wildly out of control.
The open border thereafter became a political liability for an already floundering president seeking reelection, so it shouldn’t have been that great a shock in the fall of 2023 when the administration next waived 26 different federal laws to plug similar gaps along the border in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley.
Still, there were a lot of unused panels to go around, and the state of Texas took the opportunity to grab a few from San Diego for its own border wall, which it started building in 2021.
Chapter 8: Section 2890 of the National Defense Authorization Act, 2024. Which brings me to an amendment that was sponsored by House GOP members to the National Defense Authorization Act, 2024 (NDAA 2024). That amendment, section 2890 in the final package, is captioned “Plan for Use of Excess Construction Materials on the Southwest Border”.
It directs DoD — within 75 days of the enactment of NDAA 2024 — to:
submit to Congress a plan to use, transfer, or donate to States on the southern border of the United States all covered materials, with prioritization given to the refurbishment and or maintenance of ports of entry along the southwest border and construction projects aimed at stopping illicit human and vehicle traffic along the border of the United States with Mexico.
Ostensibly, the plan was to force the administration to either get off the schneid or hand those unused fence panels over to Texas so the Lone Star State could use them to secure the border.
That plan was to continue until DoD was “no longer incurring any costs to maintain, store, or protect the covered materials”. It’s at this point that I should probably mention that at one point, not building the wall was costing taxpayers $3 million per day, as my then-colleague Rob Law reported in July 2021.
Chapter 9: The Auction. Apparently, between CBP, Texas, and California, 60 percent of the material ended up being used. That left 40 percent, however, that remained, which DoD sold in June 2024, apparently to “a government surplus auction marketplace” called GovPlanet.
Apparently, there’s not much of a private market for fence panels, because Daily Wire has screenshots of 31.91’ x 7.91’ ones up for auction starting at $5 a pop. One would assume that 252 sq. feet of American steel and concrete barriers would be a bit more costly, but it’s likely cash and carry.
Needless to say, the image of fencing panels the incoming administration is likely to start using on Day 1 sitting for the cheap on the chopping block has stirred up a firestorm of controversy that various mainstream outlets are attempting to tamp down.
Typical of the latter is a December 16 article in the Washington Post headlined “Trump says border wall material shouldn’t be sold despite congressional requirement”. Here’s a snippet:
Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a loyal Trump Republican, announced Friday that the material for sale was not usable after saying the day before on Fox News that he would be interested in buying the supplies. He said that if it made sense, Texas would have purchased the materials to give to Trump.
Not so fast, however, as Patrick himself thereafter tweeted the following on December 18:
A huge win for @RealDonaldTrump and Texas! The border wall that Joe Biden was attempting to auction off for pennies on the dollar in secret has been stopped.
Last Thursday, a tip from Border Patrol exposed Biden for attempting to sell wall panels. A few days later, the…— Dan Patrick (@DanPatrick) December 19, 2024
Chapter 10: Coda, and Lacuna. Returning to section 2890, however, keep in mind that the stated purpose of that amendment was not so much to get rid of those fencing panels regardless of the loss as it was to encourage them to be used for their intended purpose: “stopping illicit human and vehicle traffic along the border of the United States with Mexico”.
Securing the Southwest border from drugs and illegal crossings has been the point of what CBP calls the “Border Wall System” ever since Operation Hold the Line. That such a seemingly unobjectionable goal became a point of such heated controversy is bizarre bordering on madness.
The word “lacuna” technically means a gap or missing part, an apt description of the border next to miles of unused fencing panels. In law, however, it describes a hole in an argument — like why, nearly four years into the Biden administration, taxpayer money is still being wasted on what should have been a secure border.