BORDER UPDATE: The Wall Will Take How Many Years To Finish?!

This can’t be right.

I keep reading it, thinking I might not be understanding.

So Texas is putting up parts of the border here and there.

It seems one of the obstacles is private property along the border.

The Texas border is 1,254-mile.

They hope to have 100 miles of border wall by 2026.

And as it stands, at it’s current rate of construction, will take 30 years to complete!

And that’s just for Texas.

Surely there’s a better way. A faster way. Perhaps when President Trump returns he’ll have a solution.

More panels are being installed on the Texas border wall in Maverick County.

Every week, Texas constructs more border wall to protect Texans & stop illegal immigration.

Until Biden does his job and secures the border, Texas will continue to build our border wall. pic.twitter.com/QZ6nhvNX3c

— Greg Abbott (@GregAbbott_TX) July 3, 2024

Can’t we get Mr. Tesla to create a super wall builder machine?

Forget Mars, Elon. Help get this wall finished!

Gov. Abbott's border wall will take around 30 years and $20 billion to build. https://t.co/BFqMDsHBjk pic.twitter.com/mXZ5nvz2hI

— News 4 San Antonio (@News4SA) July 5, 2024

Texas Tribune report:

Three years after Gov. Greg Abbott announced Texas would take the extraordinary step of building a state-funded wall along the Mexico border, he has 34 miles of steel bollards to show for it.

That infrastructure — which has so far run up a price tag of some $25 million per mile — isn’t yet a contiguous wall. It has gone up in bits and pieces spread across at least six counties on Texas’ 1,254-mile southern border. Progress has been hampered by the state’s struggles to secure land access, one of myriad challenges signaling a long and enormously expensive slog ahead for Abbott.

Nonetheless, state contractors have already propped up more wall mileage than former President Donald Trump’s administration managed to build in Texas, and Abbott’s wall project is plowing ahead at a quickened pace. State officials hope to erect a total of 100 miles by the end of 2026, at a rate of about half a mile per week. The governor frequently shares video of wall construction on social media and has credited the project with helping combat immigration flows. To date, though, steel barriers cover just 4% of the more than 800 miles identified by state officials as “in need of some kind of a barrier.” And at its current rate — assuming officials somehow persuade all private landowners along the way to turn their property over to the state — construction would take around 30 years and upwards of $20 billion to finish.

Under Abbott’s direction, state lawmakers have approved more than $3 billion for the wall since 2021, making it one of the biggest items under the GOP governor’s $11 billion border crackdown known as Operation Lone Star. The rest of the money is being used for items like flooding the border with state police and National Guard soldiers and transporting migrants to Democrat-controlled cities outside Texas, all of which Abbott and other Republicans say is needed to stem the historic number of migrants trying to enter the country.

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Democrats and immigration advocates have cast the wall project as a taxpayer-funded pipe dream that will do nothing to address the root causes driving the immigration crisis. And they say the governor, in reviving what was once a hallmark of Trump’s agenda, is using public money to boost his political stock.

Even some immigration-hawk Republicans are showing unease about the mounting costs of the wall.

“I am, too, concerned that we’re spending a whole lot of money to give the appearance of doing something rather than taking the problem on to actually solve it, and until we do that, I don’t expect to see much happen,” state Sen. Bob Hall, R-Edgewood, said last fall before voting in committee to spend another $1.5 billion in wall funding.

Acquiring land

The construction pace has largely hinged on the state’s success securing rights to build the wall through privately owned borderland. Early on, the project showed little signs of life as state contractors struggled to obtain the needed easements. But things picked up last year as the state began working out more agreements covering larger tracts. Through mid-June, officials had secured 79 easements covering about 59 miles of the border, according to Mike Novak, executive director of the Texas Facilities Commission, which is overseeing the effort.

At a facilities commission meeting last month, Novak said state officials were in various stages of negotiation with landowners over another 113 miles.

“We knew from the beginning that this was going to be the choke point, you know, one of the most challenging parts of this program,” Novak said of land acquisition. “And it proved true. But we’ve remained steadfast.”

Officials had built 33.5 miles of wall through June 14, a facilities commission spokesperson said.

We need a miracle.