DHS reveals grand plan for border: 1,422 miles of wall along Mexico boundary

The Department of Homeland Security on Friday revealed its ambitious Smart Wall plans for the U.S.-Mexico border, with fences stretching 1,422 miles along the boundary, more than double the current length, with sensor technology to protect the remaining area too rugged for a wall.

Barriers will begin at the Pacific Ocean in San Diego, run largely uninterrupted until they reach the western edge of the Big Bend area of Texas, then pick up northwest of Laredo and run to the Gulf of America near Brownsville.

Customs and Border Protection, the agency that oversees the boundary, said it has just issued $4.5 billion in new contracts to get construction started.

That money — the first installment from tens of billions of dollars allocated in President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill budget law — will pay for 230 miles of new fencing and 400 miles of new roads and technology.

And CBP revealed a rebrand from the old name, the wall system to the Smart Wall.

“For years, Washington talked about border security but failed to deliver. This president changed that,” CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott said. “The Smart Wall means more miles of barriers, more technology and more capability for our agents on the ground. This is how you take control of the border.”

To speed construction, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem issued waivers of environmental laws for sections of the wall to go up in Southern California and New Mexico.

The wall was the marquee promise from Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign and one he made significant headway on in his first term, completing 458 miles of fence construction.

But his 2020 election defeat turned things over to President Biden, who shut down construction. That erased several hundred miles of wall already planned, and it left hundreds more miles where Mr. Trump had built the fencing but didn’t finish the roads and technology that were planned.

With his reelection last year, Mr. Trump vowed to finish the job, and the new numbers Friday reveal just what he has planned.

As of Jan. 20, just 702 miles of the 1,954-mile-long border with Mexico had some form of fencing or barrier — about 36%.

By the time Mr. Trump is done, that will be 1,422 miles, or nearly 73%.

The remaining 532 miles — largely matching the Big Bend area of western Texas — is too rugged or remote to need a wall and will instead be covered by detection technology, CBP said.

The new plans give final answers to questions that have dogged Mr. Trump since he first suggested a “big, beautiful wall” in the 2016 campaign.

At that time, he said a wall wouldn’t need to run from sea to sea, but he vacillated on the exact length and what it would look like. His campaign speeches referred to a concrete structure, and his vow that Mexico would pay for it was a favorite applause line for his raucous crowds.

Early in 2017, he held a wall-building competition and personally visited the site to look at the options. But Congress stepped in and, while giving him some money, ordered him to use the steel slat design that remains the standard.

In late 2018, an impasse with Congress over his demand for an increase in wall funding led to the longest government shutdown on record.

Mr. Trump relented after 35 days, accepting the lower dollar figure from Congress but turning around and declaring an emergency, siphoning billions of dollars from existing Pentagon accounts instead.

By the time he left office in 2021, Congress had given him $4.5 billion, and he had cobbled together an additional $10.5 billion from the Defense Department and a Treasury forfeiture fund. 

It was enough to pay for 738 miles of wall construction, but just 458 miles of barrier were erected when Mr. Biden took over.

And because Mr. Trump prioritized fencing to meet a self-imposed Election Day 2020 deadline, most of those miles lacked the roads, lights and sensor technology to complete the wall system.

The Government Accountability Office in 2021 reported that just 69 of the new miles had all of the components the Border Patrol had planned.

“While the wall panels are typically the most costly part of border barrier construction, the full wall system remains incomplete,” the GAO said at the time.

The Biden administration had money in place to complete the plans, but Mr. Biden’s vow not to build “another foot” of wall shut down work, leaving literal gaps in the wall and hundreds of miles without the roads and technology.

The CBP on Friday said its new plans call for backfilling technology along 550 miles of previously constructed fencing.

BCCG Joint Venture was the big winner with seven of those contracts, worth more than $3 billion.

Barnard Spencer Joint Venture won two contracts worth about $780 million.

The final $574 million contract went to Fisher Sand & Gravel Co. for constructing eight miles of barrier, plus installing 63 miles of the technology and infrastructure add-ons in California.

Fisher was a major player in wall-building in the first Trump administration, though it ran afoul of the feds when it worked to put up 3.5 miles of a privately funded barrier for We Build the Wall, which crowdsourced funding. Federal inspectors said the private wall was so poorly designed that it was unstable and quickly showed erosion.

Fisher reached a settlement with the Justice Department in 2022, agreeing to repairs for 15 years.

Several executives from We Build the Wall were convicted of federal charges.

Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, who was involved, escaped federal prosecution, thanks to a pardon by the president during his final hours in office in 2021. Mr. Bannon went on to plead guilty to a state charge in New York this year in a deal that saw him avoid jail time.