Tag: Trump border wall

Border Officials Confirm: Government Has Built No New Wall

Customs and Border Protection officials admitted this week that despite Donald Trump’s claims, not a single new mile of border wall has been built in Trump’s nearly three years in office.

Trump has repeatedly suggested he has kept his signature campaign promise — a massive wall along the entire U.S.-Mexico border funded entirely by Mexico. As recently as Wednesday, he claimed that “massive” sections were “going up rapidly.”

That claim is totally debunked by a document provided to Newsweek this week by CBP and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

View the complete October 2 article by Josh Israel on the National Memo website here.

Acting homeland security chief frustrated and isolated — even as he delivers what Trump wants at the border

Washington Post logoNearly six months after taking over the Department of Homeland Security as acting secretary, Kevin McAleenan has guided the United States out of a crisis at the southern border, but he also says he has lost command of the public messaging from his department and lacks some of the authority he was promised when he took the job.

Increasingly isolated within the administration and overshadowed by others who are more effusive in their praise for President Trump, McAleenan said he retains “operational” control of DHS — mainly the ability to coordinate work at the border among U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, and Citizenship and Immigration Services.

But he acknowledged that he is losing the battle to keep DHS, which he views as a neutral law enforcement agency, from being used as a powerful tool for a partisan immigration agenda.

View the complete October 1 article by Nick Miroff on The Washington Post website here.

Fight over Trump’s wall raises odds of ‘continuous’ stopgap measures

The Hill logoCongress is moving toward passing a short-term spending bill to avoid a government shutdown, but some lawmakers are warning it could be the first in a series of stopgap funding measures over the next year to avoid a fight over President Trump’s border wall.

Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), the top appropriator in the Senate, said it’s possible Congress will spend the next fiscal year passing several stopgap bills, known as continuing resolutions (CRs).

“I don’t know if we’ll end up in a shutdown, but we could end up with continuous CRs,” he said. “That could be the endgame.”

View the complete September 22 article by Niv Elis on The Hill website here.

Border fence construction could destroy archaeological sites, National Park Service finds

Washington Post logoThe bulldozers and excavators rushing to install President Trump’s border fence could damage or destroy up to 22 archaeological sites within Arizona’s Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in coming months, according to an internal National Park Service report obtained by The Washington Post.

The 123-page report, completed in July and obtained via the Freedom of Information Act, indicates that the administration’s plan to convert an existing five-foot-high vehicle barrier to a 30-foot steel edifice could pose irreparable harm to unexcavated remnants of ancient Sonoran Desert peoples. Experts identified these risks as U.S. Customs and Border Protection seeks to fast-track the pace of construction to meet Trump’s campaign pledge of completing 500 miles of barrier by next year’s election.

Read the full National Park Service report

New construction began last month within the internationally recognized biosphere reserve, a national monument southwest of Phoenix with nearly 330,000 acres of congressionally designated wilderness. The work is part of a 43-mile span of fencing that also traverses the adjacent Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge.

View the complete September 17 article by Juliet Eilperin and Nick Miroff on The Washington Post website here.

Eric Trump’s Four-Pinocchio claim that the Obamacare website cost more than Trump’s border barrier Add to list

Washington Post logo“President Trump’s wall costs less than the Obamacare website. Let that sink in, America.”

— Quote attributed to comedian Tim Allen in an Instagram post by Eric Trump

Eric Trump, one of the president’s sons, has quite a following on social media, so his posts attract a lot of attention. This particular one achieved nearly 80,000 likes within days.

But there are two big problems. First, it’s factually incorrect. Second, while Allen is a conservative, he did not say this. A query to the Trump Organization, where Trump is executive vice president, for comment did not receive a response.

The Facts

First, let’s deal with Allen. There was a Tim Allen — unrelated to the actor — who on Aug. 25 posted a lengthy diatribe on Facebook that included this line. This Tim Allen describes himself as a jewelry technician who lives in Franklin, Va. But that did not stop thousands of people from distributing his post as coming from the actor.

View the complete September 16 article by Glenn Kessler on The Washington Post website here.

Suddenly Trump’s Base May See Unhappy Consequences Of His Rule

Perhaps the most ridiculous thing that President Donald J. Trump has done in the last several days was to use a faked weather map as a prop to justify his erroneous tweet about Alabama’s possibly being in the path of Hurricane Dorian. The alterations to the official “cone of uncertainty” from the National Hurricane Center were not only amateurish, but they were also — quite literally — criminal.

But that wasn’t the most stunning thing that Trump has done or said recently. Admittedly, rating the irrational moves of an increasingly unhinged chief executive involves lots of debate, many close calls and frequent concessions to personal bias, but my vote for most stunning move of late goes to the president’s insistence on building his infamous wall before next year’s presidential election, even if that involves criminal acts and the use of eminent domain.

According to The Washington Post, Trump has told his aides to pursue the wall at all costs: “Take the land,” he’s reportedly said. Ignore environmental regulations. And if his Cabinet officers and high-ranking aides must break the law to do it, Trump has strongly suggested he will issue presidential pardons.

View the complete September 8 article by Cynthia Tucker on the National Memo website here.

Dems eye payback against Trump’s immigration tactics

A fight with Trump over his border wall, however, could fracture the Democratic caucus.

Democrats say they’re no longer willing to throw cash to President Donald Trump for his border demands.

But they still can’t escape making a deal with Trump — a scenario that could divide the caucus over exactly how far to take their fight against the president.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) are preparing to rebuff Trump’s requests for additional wall money this month as payback for Trump’s summer of hard-line immigration moves — a position that’s in contrast to the billions of dollars that Democrats have handed over for border fencing and security since the start of Trump’s term, according to half a dozen lawmakers and aides.

View the complete September 8 article by Sarah Ferris and Heather Caygle on the Politico website here.

More than two years later, Trump’s wall remains unbuilt

Washington Post logo“And the wall is being built. It’s going up rapidly. … We’re building very large sections of wall. … We’re building different sections simultaneously. And we think by the end of next year — which will be sometime right after the election, actually — but we think we’re going to have close to 500 miles of wall which will be complete. That’ll be — what we wanted to do is about 500 miles. That will take care of all of the areas that we wanted, including some of the marginal areas that we didn’t necessarily need.”

— President Trump, in remarks at the White House, Sept. 4

Builders are at work along the southern border — but not on the concrete wall Trump promised in the 2016 campaign. Instead, they’re building see-through fences and vehicle barriers, in many cases replacing older infrastructure that was already there.

Nevertheless, this is the false claim Trump most often repeats. As of Aug. 5, the president had said 190 times that a border wall was under construction, according to The Fact Checker’s database tracking all of Trump’s false or misleading statements. (The remarks above, from Wednesday, show the count is higher by now.)

Trump earned Three Pinocchios for his wall-under-construction claim in April 2018. A year and a half later, we’re taking a fresh look at the issue in light of recent developments.

View the complete September 6 article by Salvador Rizzo on The Washington Post website here.

Democrats alarmed by Trump’s promise of pardons to build border wall

Washington Post logoThrough his pardons of political allies, conservative defenders and others convicted of federal crimes, President Trump throughout his term has sent indirect signals of his willingness to help those close to him escape punishment.

And now, the president has entwined that message with his chief campaign promise — by privately assuring aides that he would pardon them of any potential illegality as the administration rushes to build his border wall before he returns to the ballot next November.

The notion has alarmed congressional Democrats, who had been investigating potential obstruction of justice on Trump’s part as the House continues to weigh whether to launch impeachment proceedings once lawmakers return to Washington next month.

View the complete August 28 article by Seung Min Kim and Mike DeBonis on The Washington Post website here.

‘Take the land’: President Trump wants a border wall. He wants it black. And he wants it by Election Day.

Washington Post logoPresident Trump is so eager to complete hundreds of miles of border fence ahead of the 2020 presidential election that he has directed aides to fast-track billions of dollars’ worth of construction contracts, aggressively seize private land and disregard environmental rules, according to current and former officials involved with the project.

He also has told worried subordinates that he will pardon them of any potential wrongdoing should they have to break laws to get the barriers built quickly, those officials said.

Trump has repeatedly promised to complete 500 miles of fencing by the time voters go to the polls in November 2020, stirring chants of “Finish the Wall!” at his political rallies as he pushes for tighter border controls. But the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has completed just about 60 miles of “replacement” barrier during the first 2½ years of Trump’s presidency, all of it in areas that previously had border infrastructure.

View the complete August 27 article by Nick Miroff and Josh Dawsey on The Washington Post website here.