The Department of Homeland Security is “ahead of schedule and… below budget on building the border wall” from California’s beaches to the Texas coast, says Rodney Scott, the nation’s top border patrol leader.
“We’ll have the entire system — to include a secondary barrier in places we need it, the water barrier in the Rio Grande River, and the [monitoring] technology that was paid for by OB3 [One Big Beautiful Bill Act] — done by July 2028,” he told Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies.
Scott explained:
Trump 45 got a bunch of border wall money in place, OB3 added to that. The [Joe] Biden administration did everything they could to prevent the border wall from being built, but Congress never rescinded that money, so they could not legally shut off the contracts. They couldn’t legally officially stop it, they just slow-rolled it for four years and wasted millions, actually probably billions of dollars.
We turned that back on on January 20. We kicked that back into place and started leveraging that money. And then the Big Beautiful Bill provided $46.5 billion to finish building out the smart border wall system.
It’s not just a wall… It is a barrier. There’s a 30-foot-high bollard wall that everybody’s familiar with. They see it. But I call it a smart wall because it’s infused with technology that allows our agents to be spread out farther. It cues them when anybody’s even close to it. It also includes some camera systems. The primary border wall will — I’ve made a commitment to the president — be done by the end of 2027.
Everywhere the border patrol has plans to build that wall will be done in 2027.
There are a couple of gaps, but basically from San Diego all the way to the Gulf. The only places we’re not building a border wall is places where we’ve made a conscious decision that we don’t need it. Big Bend National Park, for example, super remote area with very high cliffs, you can’t drive through the area… I’m not into wasting taxpayers’ money.
The barrier will be deepened by July 2028, he said:
We’ll have the entire system to include a secondary barrier in places we need it, the water barrier in the Rio Grande River, and the technology that was paid for by OB3… The new water barrier [is] the buoy barrier that we tested during Trump 45 right at the very end. As Chief of the Border Patrol I was trying to deploy that, and then the Biden administration shut it all off. There’s going to be several hundred miles of that throughout the Rio Grande River, and that is the equivalent of a physical border wall on the border.
Trump’s policies are very different from the pro-migration policies pushed by Biden. Those policies were intended to pull migrants into the United States regardless of the border wall sections built in Trump’s first term, he said:
I was the chief of the Border Patrol for the first seven months [of the Biden administration] through August of 2021. There was no recommendation that was pro-border security that was taken into [policy] …
I sat in meetings, I listened to people systematically figure out how to work around Congress to stop building the border wall. The performance metrics got shifted immediately — it wasn’t about securing the border, it was about how fast can you process people and then let them go?
They were trying to push and force us to work with NGOs [non-governmental organizations] to provide benefits [to migrants]. Everything that you saw later during the Biden administration that literally facilitated illegal immigration was what I was basically arguing against for the first seven months.
Not just me, but everything that any border security expert that had a chance to whisper in their ear told them [was] “Without [legal] consequences [for illegal migration], you are literally opening the dam. This isn’t about the 15 people standing in Tijuana right now [in 2021] — this is about millions of people around the world are going to see this as an invitation to come to the United States.”
I honestly have to admit, even I was surprised that they [responded by saying], ‘And?”
Biden’s top deputies, including Alejandro Mayorkas, encouraged mass migration into U.S. jobs and housing by quickly releasing migrants. The catch-and-release policy allowed migrants to get the jobs they needed to pay off the mortgages they had borrowed to cover the smuggling costs. The migrants then used cellphones to display their success in the United States, so encouraging more waves of migrants to risk — and often, to lose — their lives on the trek.
But if Biden’s officials had not released the migrants to get jobs, the migrants would have been detained, deported, financially ruined, and stuck at home to discourage the next wave of migrants. In turn, Americans would have gotten higher wages and cheaper housing — and likely, more families and more children — if the migrants had not been invited by Biden’s business-backed officials.
Biden’s agents were pro-migration progressives, said Scott:
They literally just had a completely different perspective on the world. They didn’t see America as a place to preserve or to protect or to put first. They saw it as a place to provide freebies to other people from anywhere around the world.
I told them, many other people told them, we put it in writing, we showed them historically when certain things had taken place and [when] there was no [legal] consequence to illegal immigration, what would happen.
More so — and I want everybody to understand this — it’s not [just] about illegal immigration. We, I, explained to them in detail how the cartels depend upon illegal immigration to distract and overwhelm law enforcement [at the border], so that they can get the second wave of — whether it be people, narcotics, or anybody willing to pay extra to avoid a law enforcement officer — [through].
“We showed the Biden administration facts and evidence of how that happens, how [the cartels] work it out, and they didn’t care,” Scott said.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans — and thousands of migrants — were killed by drugs and crime in Biden’s administration.
“This administration cares, and we shut it off immediately,” said Scott.