by WorldTribune Staff, May 28, 2019
A private group has begun and completed construction on a section of a border wall at what it said is one of the most dangerous parts of the U.S.-Mexico border.
We Build the Wall announced on May 27 that it had completed a half-mile wall section in New Mexico.
Kris Kobach, a former secretary of state in Kansas and an informal immigration adviser to President Donald Trump, said the New Mexico project has the president’s blessing and says local Border Patrol agents are eager to have the assistance.
“We’re closing a gap that’s been a big headache for them,” said Kobach, who is general counsel for We Build the Wall.
The CEO of the group, Air Force veteran Brian Kolfage, has raised $20 million through GoFundMe for the project.
Kolfage told Gateway Pundit that “We threw like 15 people together and we just built an international border wall. So I think this sticks the thumb in everyone’s eye who said we couldn’t do it. They said nasty things about me, about my family, and that we were scammers. We proved them wrong. And this is just the first segment. From start to finish, from the time we found the property to the time we built the wall was 57 days. 57 days! We got a contractor, we got a plan, and we implemented it over the weekend and got this wall built!”
Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, who chairs We Build the Wall’s advisory board, said the New Mexico project, overseen by construction mogul Tommy Fisher of North Dakota-based Fisher Industries, involved hundreds of workers and cost $6 million.
The wall begins at the Rio Grande and runs up to the lower elevations of Mount Cristo Rey.
“The wall on the Texas side ends at the river, and there used to be a gap on the New Mexico side running from the river over to Mount Cristo Rey,” Stephen Dinan reported for The Washington Times. “Two parking lots, one on the Mexican side and one on the U.S. side, with nothing but a ditch to separate them, offered a convenient staging point for would-be migrants.”
Bannon said, after procuring rights to the land, the group started construction on May 24 at a precarious mountain strip “where the cartels and asylum seekers are coming in” through a gap between two 21-mile strips of completed wall.
The section was also built faster and likely more cheaply than the government has been able to manage in recent years, the group said.
We Build the Wall’s effort began after a federal judge ordered a halt to part of Trump’s emergency declaration and shifting of money within the Pentagon to make up for Congress’s refusal to grant him the money he wanted to build the wall.
Judge Haywood Gilliam says the president can’t spend money when Congress has debated it and refused to approve it.
Kobach said agents have told him some 100 migrants cross the border each night at the area the new wall was built and that drug smugglers would use the distraction to run drugs through elsewhere in the gap.
A typical night could exceed $100,000 worth of drugs through the gap, Kobach said.
Fisher Sand & Gravel did the construction on We Build the Wall’s project. Trump has suggested the government should consider using the company for future border wall construction.
Fisher announced he could build 234 miles of fencing at $1.4 billion — or about $6 million per mile. The current cost to the government for the border barrier is about $25 million per mile.
Kobach said the group kept the project under wraps to prevent anti-wall activists from disrupting them. For that same reason, he declined to disclose where future construction might happen.
Visit We Build the Wall’s website here
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