by Eric Lendrum
Ever since the Biden Administration halted all construction of the border wall, over $100 million worth of construction equipment intended to be used in finishing the wall has been sitting unused along the border in Texas, as reported by the New York Post.
After Biden ordered a halt to all construction and illegally cancelled numerous construction contracts with various companies, the material has been slowly rusting along the border, often right next to portions of the wall that were already completed.
Footage from a Fox News drone showed well over 10,000 steel panels among the equipment lying dormant along the border in Pharr, Texas. This material alone would have been enough to build over 100 miles of the wall, but has remained unused since January.
“Keep in mind,” Fox News reporter Bill Melugin noted in his coverage, “taxpayers have already paid for this. It’s bought and paid for, and nothing is happening with it.”
Further footage shows how the cancellation of the wall led to the wall coming to an abrupt end in La Joya; the sudden gap in the barrier has created an easy entry point for illegal aliens who continue to flood over the border in the hundreds of thousands.
“Basically, it’s useless. We watch these [illegals] just walk around it all the time,” Melugin continued. “It’s not doing anything, and the border agents out here are having to run around left and right as runners are constantly coming through.”
One of the penalties for cancelling the border wall construction contracts has been daily payments of $5 million from the federal government to each of the construction companies.
“Many of those projects today are just still on hold, so we’re paying contractors,” said former Border Patrol chief Rodney Scott. “For a while, it was almost five million a day between [Department of Defense] and [Department of Homeland Security] to not build the border wall.”
The stark images and subsequent spike in illegal immigration reflects the sheer contrast between the hawkish policies of the Trump Administration and the open-border policies of the Biden Administration. As a candidate in 2020, Biden advocated for opening the border and letting in as many illegal aliens as possible, promising numerous taxpayer-funded benefits for all illegals, including free healthcare and free education.
Over the course of President Trump’s first term in office, roughly 453 miles of new border wall were constructed, fulfilling his major campaign promise to “build the wall.” This amounted to well over half of the entire border along which there were no pre-existing barriers, with about 300 further miles planned or under construction at the time Joe Biden took over.
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Eric Lendrum is a reporter at American Greatness.
Photo “Border Wall” by Gillfoto. CC BY-SA 4.0.
