DHS Already Has Another 100 Miles of Wall in the Works, and More Is On the Way

Stephen Dinan | September 1, 2025

(The Washington Times) — President Trump appears to have finally triumphed in the border wall battle, turning a major political battleground issue into a no-brainer winner for a majority of voters and Congress.

Just months into his second term, Mr. Trump has 100 miles of border barrier in the works. Capitol Hill has approved an additional $46.5 billion to add hundreds more miles and finish his marquee promise from his 2016 campaign.

The money was approved this summer with barely a whimper from lawmakers as part of Mr. Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. In 2018, during Mr. Trump’s first term, his demands for $25 billion in wall money helped sink a deal to legalize illegal immigrant Dreamers. A year later, his $5 billion request spurred the longest government shutdown in history.

Customs and Border Protection said it has 83 miles of traditional wall and 17 miles of waterborne barriers either under construction or in planning, using money left over from the first Trump administration. President Biden slow-walked those funds, but they never expired and were waiting for Mr. Trump in January.

CBP said it has a “robust acquisition strategy” to spend the money to complete Mr. Trump’s border wall vision and fill in the gaps Mr. Biden left when he halted all construction on his first day in office in 2021.

“Today, only one-third of the southwest border has man-made barriers, and the majority of the current barriers are missing the detection technology, cameras and lighting that today are part of the ‘system’ — which provides agents with the intel and domain awareness to respond to illegal activity,” the agency told The Washington Times.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem granted a waiver Tuesday to exempt wall construction in southern Texas from environmental rules. She cited the continued flow of drugs across the border in the Rio Grande Valley area as the impetus.

The wall has become one of Mr. Trump’s most popular immigration proposals, drawing 56% support in a Pew Research Center survey in June. That was up from 46% in 2019, when Mr. Trump was last battling Congress for money.

As much as Mr. Trump has won the fight for the border wall, it might be more precise to say Mr. Biden lost it.

Millions of people pouring in and spreading throughout the country delivered headlines about crime and strained government services to Americans’ doorsteps. When 22-year-old Laken Riley was slain by a Venezuelan migrant in Georgia and New York City said it would have to cut billions of dollars from other services to help the new arrivals, voters took notice.

“The Democrats were on their heels because now how could they possibly defend all this stuff the media was reporting in New York and Boston and Los Angeles?” said Emilio Gonzalez, who ran U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in the Bush administration and is now running for mayor of Miami.

“The pithy term that every state is a border state? That resonated,” he said.

Mr. Trump has characterized the Biden years as wasted time on the wall. He was particularly incensed at the previous administration’s sell-off of wall materials for pennies on the dollar.

“They stole the wall from us,” he told reporters during a recent press conference. “That was when I first realized that these people want to have open borders.”

His 2016 campaign promise was to build a border wall and to have Mexico pay for it. Mexico has never written a check. Mr. Trump instead went to Congress for the money, but lawmakers balked at the size of his demands. He won $341 million in 2017 and then about $1.4 billion yearly from 2018 to 2020.

After Congress rejected his $5 billion request in 2019, he declared an emergency. To pursue his plans, he siphoned about $600 million from forfeited Treasury Department accounts and $10 billion in counternarcotics and military construction money from Pentagon accounts.

He completed more than 450 miles of barriers, though most replaced outdated or ineffective fencing. Mr. Trump walled off less than 50 miles of previously unfenced border.

David J. Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, said the opposition to the previous border wall was overstated. He said Democrats were prepared to support wall funding as part of a deal in 2018, but Republicans retreated after the Trump administration’s criticism of the plan.

He said the money in the new budget law will fund “an unimaginable amount” of barriers, roads, towers, cameras and sensors.

“They are going to plow 2,000 miles of border. We are talking about Korean Demilitarized Zone levels of barriers,” he said.

Even then, he doubted the money would be used up. He worried that the extra would be siphoned into migrant detention facilities or personnel recruitment.

Mr. Bier said the focus on the wall was “quite strange,” given how much the border has improved with the existing 700 or so miles, which include barriers built under the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations, as well as Mr. Trump and, despite his declarations to the contrary, a few miles under Mr. Biden.

Art Del Cueto, a former Border Patrol agent now working for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, said the lower number of border violations is no reason to slow barrier improvements.

He said walls work by shaping how illegal immigrants attempt to cross. That means agents can be better positioned to respond and catch the people who cross the border illegally.

“It’s not a be-all-end-all. It doesn’t stop everything, but what it allows is the Border Patrol and different agencies that work in those areas to strategically place agents where they’re needed more,” he said.