U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) maintenance logs reveal how criminal organizations have sawed off blocks of the Trump-era Southern border wall thousands of times to smuggle migrants from Mexico into the United States over the last three years.
The unpublished records, which were obtained by The Washington Post, show that smuggling gangs breached sections of the border wall at least 3,272 times in the Arizona border cities of Naco and Douglas as well as in New Mexico.
Under the Trump administration, at least $2.6 million was spent to repair the breaches that were made to steel bollards (sturdy posts), which ranged from 18 to 30 feet.
Smuggling gangs took to cheap power tools to detach the bottom end of the beams from the ground, leaving the top part dangling as migrants zipped through the desert border and continued into the U.S.
A person with knowledge of the border wall breaches told The Washington Post that the smugglers ‘cut it with a fair amount of precision’ but that you really had to approach the beams up close to notice the damage.
According to outlet, a 25-mile portion of Trump’s border wall located between Naco and Douglas contained 75 bollards that had been repaired.
Repair crews have installed metal plates that resemble a boot-like sleeve to secure the gaps, which secure the fractured steel beams to the ground.
As a measure to limit the influx of undocumented migrants who were unlawfully ferried across the 1,954-mile southwestern border, Trump stuck to his election promise of building a border wall by constructing 458 miles of new barriers set up throughout New Mexico and Arizona during his four-year term.
US Customs and Border Protection discovered a hole cut into Southern California’s border fence with Mexico on Wednesday, March 3, 2021, where 13 people were killed after vehicle carrying more than 40 migrants crashed
Former President Donald Trump (pictured on February 26, 2022) was able to construct more than 400 new barrier miles at the border with Mexico, but smugglers have found ways to breach the new fencing by sawing off the bottom end of the steel beams to smuggle migrants into the US
CBP reported 2,035,010 encounters with undocumented migrants who were stopped by U.S. Border Patrol agents for unlawful crossing of the United States-Mexico border between January 2021 and December 2021
51 migrants from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras were stopped while crossing border in Arizona
‘No structure is impenetrable,’ CBP spokesman Luis Miranda said in a statement provided to The Washington Post. ‘So we will continue to focus resources on modern, effective management measures to improve safety and security.’
Logs show that smugglers breached the border wall on 1,867 occasions in U.S. Border Patrol’s El Centro Sector. The San Diego Sector reported 866 breaches.
CBP detected 891 breaches in fiscal year 2019 when border agents reported 977,509 encounters with migrants stopped for unlawful border entry. Another 906 breaches were registered throughout fiscal year 2020 when the agency tallied 458,088 interdictions.
As breaches spiked to 1,475 in fiscal year 2021, so did encounters with migrants as border patrol officers reported 1,734,686 interdictions.
‘Every bit of infrastructure that I’ve ever worked around over the past 26 years gets tested,’ U.S. Border Patrol Tucson Sector Chief John Modlin told The Washington Post. ‘At some point, people will try to get past it.’
Asylum seekers wait to be processed by border patrol in Yuma, Arizona, in February 2022 near the border wall
A child sits on a cardboard box while migrants wait to be processed by border agents in Yuma, Arizona, on February 22
Trump vowed that Mexico would cover the cost of the border structure, but instead the U.S. spent $11 billion in tax dollars, which was primarily pulled from Defense Department funding.
Upon entering office, President Joe Biden terminated his predecessor’s project, claiming in a January 2021 action that ‘no more American taxpayer dollars be diverted to construct a border wall.’
The Biden administration followed with an executive decision instructing the Department of Defense to cancel border wall construction contracts in April 2021.
However, in December 2021, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas authorized projects that allowed CBP to use funding provided by Congress to repair damaged border wall gaps in Arizona, California and Texas along border barriers that were part of Trump’s border wall plan.
