AUSTIN, Texas — Texas will finally begin construction on a massive wall along its border with Mexico after a year and a half of little progress since Gov. Greg Abbott vowed to finish projects undertaken by President Donald Trump.
Workers will begin installing a new portion of slatted wall along an unspecified portion of the border come January, the governor announced late Tuesday evening.
Abbott, who will begin a third term in office as the project begins, expects it to last through 2023.
“More border wall is going up next month. It took months to negotiate with private property owners on the border for the right to build on their property,” Abbott wrote in a post to Twitter. “We now should be building more border wall all of next year.
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The Trump administration completed 450 miles, most of which was a double barrier or replaced shorter barriers, of wall along the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border in its four years. However, most of the 450 miles were completed in the three other border states: California, Arizona, and New Mexico.
Roughly 300 miles more miles of wall were funded but not completed by the time Trump left office.
President Joe Biden entered office in January 2021 and immediately canceled billions of dollars of border wall projects, including ones that were funded by Congress during the Trump administration and others that were funded with money that the White House diverted from defense and treasury coffers.
By March, the number of illegal immigrants being apprehended at the southern border had spiked and continued to increase through the spring, prompting Abbott to take unprecedented state action.
Abbott announced shortly after in June 2021 that he would finish the wall in hopes of preventing noncitizens and drug smugglers from illegally crossing from Mexico into Texas amid record-high numbers of encounters at the border over the past two years.
Texas broke ground on a 2-mile-long portion of barrier in Rio Grande City in December 2021 and completed it this year.
Abbott’s wall will likely be the biggest project the state undertakes during his tenure.
Texas has more miles along the international border than other southern border states: Arizona, California, and New Mexico. The Texas-Mexico boundary stretches for 1,241 miles, but just 145 miles of it has any sort of substantive fence or wall, according to federal planning documents from Trump-era wall projects and information provided by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Abbott wants to put up a wall on the remaining 1,100 miles. At an average cost of $20 million per mile, it is a tall order — even for Texas.
The southern tip of Texas is roughly half the distance for Central American immigrants traveling from Mexico’s southern border than if they traveled to California, making it a far quicker and cheaper journey for immigrants. Consequently, Texas has seen more than 2 million illegal immigrants encountered along its border these past two years.
Immigrants have far fewer issues getting across the border in Texas than in other states because just 12% of the land has any sort of government-funded barrier to block people from entering. Recognizing that, the Republican governor put a $250 million down payment toward the project and hired a program manager to begin planning where a wall should be built.
Abbott’s two main challenges over the past 18 months have been legal obstacles and logistical headaches.
Part of the delay with building a wall in Texas under Trump was due to problems obtaining privately owned and protected federal land in the Rio Grande Valley and Laredo.
Any builder, albeit from the state or federal government, must own or have the right to build on the land. The U.S. government is more likely to own land on the international border, so Abbott would have to purchase it from Washington, D.C., according to Josh Jones, the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s senior fellow in border security.
Earlier this year, Texas awarded three contracts totaling $600 million for 27 miles to a private contractor.
The state has $4 billion on hand for border security operations and has also opened the border wall project to the public.
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The governor is also crowdfunding donations and has raised $55 million to date.
