Turns out Trump really IS already building the wall!

Eddie Scarry, who writes for the Washington Examiner, assumed Trump wasn’t telling the truth the other day when he said they’d begun building the wall along the Rio Grande.

He cites Trump saying it at the El Paso rally, but he also said it here:

Scarry noted that he thought was just saying it to keep his fans from mobbing him because he hadn’t built the wall yet.

But as Scarry quickly found out, Trump wasn’t lying about it:

I’m happy to say I was wrong. Trump was telling the truth.

I checked in with agents at the Rio Grande Valley border sector to see if they knew what new “wall” Trump was talking about. They sent me information on construction for new border barrier announced last year. The project funds six miles-worth of concrete and steel barrier of the sort that agents told me in January is immensely successful in deterring illegal border crossings.

The wall will be supplemented by “detection technology, lighting, video surveillance, and an all-weather patrol road parallel” to the barrier, according to a release sent out by the CBP in November.

And the $145 million for it didn’t come from some long-ago-passed funding bill passed under former President Barack Obama. It was included in U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s budget for fiscal year 2018. Unlike other parts of new barrier construction and reparation, Trump can actually take credit for this one!

This is excellent news. I’d heard him say that too and wondered what this was really all about.

In related news, Trump isn’t saying yet whether or not he’ll vote for the border package. Fox News reported that the package is over 1,000 pages long and Trump’s people are doing a deep dive into the legislation to find out what’s in it. And until they go through everything, Trump isn’t saying one way or the other.


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