Some Republican lawmakers are dismayed by a recent video purporting to show border wall panels left over from the first Trump administration being hauled away from the Arizona border. But the federal government says it’s part of an ongoing process approved by Congress.
All told, the first Trump administration lined some 450 miles of borderland with a 30-foot steel bollard wall before President Joe Biden canceled existing contracts for the project in 2021.
Myles Traphagen, borderlands program coordinator with Wildland Network, has been tracking the leftover materials ever since.
“At this time, I would estimate that there are 100,000 bollards, which are the steel posts used to make the border wall, left over sitting in staging areas in Arizona and New Mexico,” he said. “This is not a Biden administration tactic to try to hamstring the Trump administration, quite to the contrary. In 2022 the Biden administration gave the state of Texas a substantial amount of material to build their own border wall.”
Traphagen said much of the remaining panel piles are in New Mexico, but some remain in Arizona, too. The Biden administration has also green-lit additional wall construction in sites including a portion of the Coronado National Memorial, which could begin next September.
The video — published by the Daily Wire last week — was shared by an unnamed Border Patrol agent and purports to show trucks carrying bollards away from an area south of Tucson, along with screenshots from this month of the panels on the government surplus auction site GOVPLANET.
Congressman Eli Crane told the publication the move was “purposely hamstringing” the new Trump administration’s plan to continue building the wall. But, according to a Department of Defense official, it’s actually a process that’s been ongoing for months as part of the National Defense Authorization Act, which Congress passed last December. A portion of the law requires the agency to use, transfer or donate all remaining border wall material bought with Defense funding.
The Defense Department said 60% of the material was transferred or donated to authorized recipients like Texas and California, and in June, the other 40% was sold under a competitive sales contract process to GOVPLANET. The official said the agency doesn’t have control over sales through online auctions on that site.
