Trump’s walls are not that easy to tear down.
Joe Biden promises to deal with immigrants differently than his predecessor as the future US president. But Donald Trump’s politics will shape the country for years to come.
More than 600,000 tons of steel and almost 700,000 cubic meters of concrete spread over 680 kilometres. This is the preliminary balance of Donald Trump’s once most important election promise. He wanted to build a wall, make Mexico pay for it, make the USA safe again. Safe from all the “criminals, rapists and drugs” who could come into the country unprotected by then across the southern border, as he said when he applied for the presidency in 2015. And until the last day of his presidency on January 20th, there will be more excavation and construction, on one government site everyone can see the progress. Construction costs per mile of the wall: just under $ 20 million.
Trump will not be able to complete his announced “big, beautiful wall” on the 3,200-kilometer border between the USA and Mexico before the end of his term in office. He has reduced the 3,200-kilometer goal even further in recent years. In his State of the Union location in February of this current year, Trump said the wall would be pulled up quickly. Still, only spoke of around 500 miles, a little over 800 kilometres, that should be completed by January 2021. Even to achieve this goal, quite a bit of concrete and steel would have to be installed within a few days.
And the finished 680 kilometres are mainly repairs to old, already existing border barriers. According to information from the border protection agency in the US media, only a few kilometres are new. But Trump does not take it that exactly. And that wouldn’t make a good meter reading either.
From January 21st, the border guard will be able to take the odometer off the website again. Future President Joe Biden wants to pursue a different immigration policy. During the election campaign, he said that he would not allow one meter of the wall to be built. But the tons of steel is not so easy to tear off – and Biden has no plans to do so.
