Story by Anna Giaritelli
Forced to go it alone, Texas officials have managed to erect more than 54 miles of security wall along the international border with Mexico during the Biden administration, the Washington Examiner has learned.
The Texas Facilities Commission installed 54.2 miles of border wall between mid-2021 and Dec. 19, an agency spokesman told the Washington Examiner on Monday.
“Almost a month ago, Director Novak noted ‘that the goal was to erect 50 miles of the wall by the end of the calendar year … that milestone could be achieved by Thanksgiving,'” a TFC spokesperson said in a statement issued last month. “The agency reached that milestone two weeks before Thanksgiving and six weeks ahead of schedule.”
The state is now halfway to its goal of delivering a minimum of 100 miles of wall by the end of 2026. All projects were funded by $3.1 billion made available during the 2021 and 2022 regular legislative sessions and the fourth special session in 2022, according to TFC spokesman Richard Glancey. Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) is also crowdfunding donations and has raised $55 million to date.
Construction is underway in 13 locations across six border counties, including Cameron, Maverick, Starr, Val Verde, Webb, and Zapata.
However, the state is expected to blow past its 100-mile goal. To date, Texas has 65 miles of border-adjacent land that has been approved through easement deals and another 109 miles of easements are also underway but not finished yet.
Abbott announced in June 2021 that the state would build wall just five months after President Joe Biden took office.
The Trump administration had completed 450 miles, most of which was a double barrier or replaced shorter barriers, along the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border over 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.
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 2021, 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.
Texas has more land along the international border than the three other southern border states. 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.
The deliberately extravagant gesture on Abbott’s part was intended to show a willingness to defend the area against illegal immigrants while Washington remained idle.
“In the Biden administration’s absence, Texas is stepping up to get the job done by building the border wall,” Abbott said at a press conference in June 2021. “Through this comprehensive public safety effort, we will secure the border, slow the influx of unlawful immigrants, and restore order in our border communities.”
Abbott put a $250 million down payment toward the project and hired a program manager to begin planning where a wall should be built.
In December 2022, Texas launched construction on a massive wall along its border with Mexico after a year and a half of little progress. Abbott said delays were due to obtaining privately owned and protected federal land in the Rio Grande Valley and Laredo, Texas.
“More border wall is going up next month,” Abbott wrote in a post to X. “It took months to negotiate with private property owners on the border for the right to build on their property. We now should be building more border wall all of next year.”
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.
We now should be building more border wall all of next year.— Greg Abbott (@GregAbbott_TX) December 14, 2022
The state focused its initial building efforts on a small tract of land where a farmer’s crop was “totally destroyed” due to the number of illegal immigrants who crossed the Rio Grande and then trampled through the fields, then-Texas General Land Office Commissioner George P. Bush said at the time.
The section of farmland getting wall now is owned by the Texas General Land Office and leased to the farmer, allowing the state to build on its own land.
Bush, the son of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and nephew of former President George W. Bush, initially oversaw the state’s search for land to build on.
The state has $4 billion on hand for border security operations and has also opened the border wall project to the public.