Well this is good news. It looks like part of Arizona is going to get a new border wall in April of next year:
DC EXAMINER – The Arizona border will have 32 miles of existing wall replaced starting next April.
The $324 million project has been given the green light by federal immigration officials, U.S. Customs and Border Protection announced Thursday.
The project will switch out an old barrier that runs from the Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector west into the Yuma Sector, which is just miles from Arizona’s border with California. The replacement wall is meant to keep pedestrians and vehicles from entering the U.S. Older barriers were largely to prevent cars from driving over, but were only a few feet tall and did little to keep people from trespassing from Mexico.
The undertaking, which will be paid for by congressional funding for CBP from 2018 legislation, is part of President Trump’s January 2017 executive order to secure the country by improving barriers in vulnerable and high-traffic areas.
Barnard Construction Company, which was not among the six companies that built the eight wall prototypes in San Diego, was given a $172 million contract for 14 miles of replacement wall near Yuma, CBP said in a news release. Another 13 miles of barrier will be completed as part of this project but CBP did not share who it awarded that funding to.
CBP also did not indicate how the remaining $152 million would be spent.
Five miles of work will take place near Lukeville, Ariz., and the other 27 miles are in Yuma’s territory.
Yuma is a hotspot with a Mexican town on the other side of the border, so I’m glad to see they’ll be getting a new border wall. Although I wonder if this will be different considering the company building it didn’t create a prototype.
If what Jim Geraghty is reporting applies here, then it is definitely different:
There are two not-quite-accurate claims about President Trump’s vision of a wall on the southern border. The first is that nothing’s been done, or that Trump’s vision of a border wall remains mythical. The other is that the “wall” — or at least the 32-foot-high concrete barrier that Trump described early in his presidency — is being built.
What is more accurate is to say that under previously passed legislation, U.S. Customs and Border Protection continues to pay contractors to replace sections of spotty or insufficient fencing with 18-foot-tall bollard walls – tall steel bars with gaps in between them so that Border Patrol officers can see what’s going on on the other side.
That sounds like exactly what is happening here. And here’s that that bollard wall looks like:
The wall is described like this:
In May, Chief Patrol Agent Aaron A. Hull of the Border Patrol’s El Paso sector described the advantages to the bollard walls. “The current fence and the mesh that we have here further east is a deterrent to illegal entry; the problem is it’s easy to breach, it’s easy to scale, and it’s expensive and time-consuming for us to repair,” Hull said at a press briefing announcing the start of the Santa Teresa wall project in New Mexico. “The wall that we’re replacing this fencing with is going to be durable. It’s going to be here for a long time. It’s going to be harder to get over, harder to get through, harder to get underneath. It’s going to have a five-foot anti-scaling plate at the top, which is going to make it very hard for entrance — even if you can get to the top.”
There are other areas in Texas where this new bollard wall is going up that you can read about here.