CBP released this drone video of the border fence being constructed to the east Yuma, Arizona and to the east of the Mexican town of San Luis Rio Colorado. I went there on September 5th, 2019 to take a look. On the other side of the border is Mexican highway 2. The unusual thing about this project is that there are multiple sections of the fence and multiple crews working on it. There are at least four sections. By a measurement with my odometer about 13.5 miles of new bollard fence have been built so far. I believe this will be a 20 mile stretch of fence. If there are four crews working on four different sections, the project should be completed in just a couple of months, but that’s just my guess. There may be plans to extend this fence another ten miles all the way to the Cabeza Prieta Mountains, beyond the 20 miles fence already being constructed.
On September 3rd, 2019, I went to the Yuha Desert just west of Calexico, Ca to see the construction of a new 15 mile section of fence that had just started 1-2 weeks earlier. With only one crew working on it at this time, it most likely take more than a year to finish. The new fence will run from just east of Signal Mountain to the Jacumba Wilderness. It’s in Imperial County, California.
Border fence construction in Tecate, August, 2019The table below lists the Border Wall Contracts awarded as of May 10, 2019. These contracts use only money appropriated by Congress in 2017-2019 and does not include any money redirected by Trump from the DoD or other government agencies. The total fence to be built under these contracts totals to 264 miles.
The money reprogrammed from DoD and other agencies under Trump’s executive order declaring an emergency will fund 2-3 times as much fence as listed in this Table. The contracts for this money, which is expiring this year, will have to be granted by the end of the government fiscal year, September 30, 2019 as the Supreme Court has approved already.
This list was obtained from an environmental group, which will not be named. It appears to to be accurate according to the media releases that I have seen from Customs and Border Protection. Either they did a FOIA request to CBP to get this information or they assembled it themselves from media releases. (Sometimes we can count on progressives to be accurate.)
Click on the “Full Screen” icon at the bottom right to be able to read the chart.
There are about 8-10 crews now (August, 2019) working at different locations on the border, building about 5-10 miles of fence per month. That should increase in coming months, as many more contracts are granted and more crews start work.
CBP has announced that they plan to complete 450 miles or more border fence by the end of 2020, if they are able to obtain the funding.
Don’t let leftists and the liberal media fool you, even this much fence will have a big impact on the traditional illegal immigration, in which they run away from the Border Patrol. However, even more may soon be in the pipeline. Every mile of new fence or replacement of the old, inadequate fence counts.
Fraudulent asylum seeking, in which illegals run towards the Border Patrol to surrender, falsely claim asylum, demand government assistance and then disappear into the US to live illegally, is a different problem and has to be solved by legal means, not by a border fence.
Video shows status of border fence in Tecate, California. On August 13th, 2019, I went to Tecate to see, if they had started building the planned new fence there. Tecate is about 20 miles east of Tijuana. They have a contract to build 4 miles of 30-foot-high bollard fence to replace the old, landing-plate fence. I found out they had already started building the fence two months earlier. About a mile and a half of the fence had already been constructed.
Shows the state of the border fence between the cities of San Diego and Tijuana. Construction of a new 15-mile secondary fence is in progress at this time and is about half finished.
