The quarter-mile fragment of wall is part of an array of new barrier segments along the border, some of them bizarre in appearance and of no apparent utility, that contractors rushed to build in the waning days of the Trump administration — well after President Biden made it clear that he would halt border wall construction.
[...]
In some places along the border, such as Guadalupe Canyon in southeast Arizona, dynamiting crews were blasting hillsides on Inauguration Day.
[...]
Now the incomplete border wall, already one of the costliest megaprojects in United States history, with an estimated eventual price tag of more than $15 billion, is igniting tensions again as critics urge Mr. Biden to tear down parts of the wall and Republican leaders call on him to finish it.
NYT
Was it planned so it would encourage people to demand it be finished? Or, more likely, was it handing out a favor to some sycophant(s) to put up wall in their territory?
A 34-month audit of border wall construction by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General last year identified significant problems, including in decisions on where wall segments would be built.
Customs and Border Protection “did not use a sound, well-documented methodology to identify and prioritize investments in areas along the border that would best benefit from physical barriers,” the auditors determined.
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Donald J. Trump made the wall a symbol of his administration’s efforts to slash immigration. While many stretches of the 1,954-mile border already had some low-level barriers built by previous administrations, the project was mired in controversy from the start.
Only a few miles were built in South Texas, the area most prone to illegal crossings. Instead, much of the construction, especially in the Trump administration’s closing days, has taken place in remote parts of Arizona where crossings in recent years have been relatively uncommon.
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U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the agency responsible for selecting border wall construction sites, contended in a statement last week that locations chosen for new border barriers are “areas of high illegal entry.”
Well, that one in the picture will certainly be difficult to get around, won't it? I'm sure it's good for some giggles as they go around it.
There are half-dynamited mountaintops where work crews put down their tools in January, leaving a heightened risk of rapid erosion and even dangerous landslides as the summer monsoon season approaches.
In some areas, colossal piles of unused steel bollards linger at deserted work sites, next to idled bulldozers and water-hauling trucks. In Arizona, ranchers are complaining that rough roads carved by work crews into hillsides near uncompleted segments of wall now serve as easy access points for smugglers and others seeking to enter the once-remote areas along the border.
Just made it easier!
“Now there are so many access roads that it’s possible for someone to walk right up to places where the wall ends, and have someone just pick them up,” said Valer Clark, a conservationist who has bought and sought to preserve about 150,000 acres of land along the border in both the United States and Mexico.
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Ricky Garza, a staff lawyer for the Texas Civil Rights Project, said the federal government still has nearly 150 open lawsuits against landowners in South Texas to survey and seize property and potentially begin construction on the border wall or other measures that could be used to detect migrants.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
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