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, including fences stretching 1,422 miles, more than double the current length, and 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, and then pick up northwest of Laredo and run to the Gulf of America near Brownsville.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the agency overseeing the boundary, said it had issued $4.5 billion in contracts to start construction.

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

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 wall sections to go up in Southern California and New Mexico.

The wall was Mr. Trump’s marquee promise from his 2016 campaign. He made significant headway in his first term by completing 458 miles of fence construction.

His 2020 election defeat turned over border security to President Biden, who shut down construction. That erased several hundred miles of the wall already planned and left hundreds more miles where Mr. Trump had built the fencing but hadn’t finished the planned roads and technology.

With his reelection last year, Mr. Trump vowed to finish the job. The numbers released Friday reveal 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 finished, 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 plans answer questions that have dogged Mr. Trump since he first suggested a “big, beautiful wall” in his 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. Yet Congress stepped in and, although 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.

After 35 days, Mr. Trump relented and accepted the lower dollar figure from Congress. He then declared an emergency and siphoned billions of dollars from existing Pentagon accounts.

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. By the time Mr. Biden took over, only 458 miles of barrier had been erected.

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.

In 2021, the Government Accountability Office reported that just 69 miles had all 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 roads and technology.

CBP’s new plans will use backfilling technology along 550 miles of previously constructed fencing.

BCCG Joint Venture was the big winner with seven 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. to construct 8 miles of barrier and install 63 miles of technology and infrastructure add-ons in California.

Fisher was a major player in wall construction in the first Trump administration, though it ran afoul of the government when it worked to put up 3½ 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.

In a settlement with the Justice Department in 2022, Fisher agreed 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 pleaded guilty to a state charge in New York this year in a deal to avoid jail time.