Efforts to rush parts of President Donald Trump’s border wall in his final days in office are doomed and in some places have actually harmed border security, according to campaigners.
Witnesses to the work in Arizona told Insider that mountainous parts of the border were easier to reach now than when Trump took power four years ago, as the process involved building new roads over rough terrain.
This is a small portion of the whole border, hundreds of miles of which have been fortified.
But sources told Insider that they’d seen a resulting increase in crossings in these weak spots, which were previously too inhospitable to be much of a security concern.
The campaigners Insider spoke to have opposed the wall from the start. But they said they could not help but notice the irony in the project harming its own aims.
The end of the wall
Trump is due to leave office on January 20, and his successor, Joe Biden, has pledged to halt construction of the wall.
Biden suggested in December that related Trump-era asylum policies could be reversed at a slower pace, but the incoming administration made no further comment about the wall itself, according to The Washington Post.
Canceling wall construction would leave behind infrastructure like roads and staging areas, created to give contractors access to difficult terrain in remote, mountainous border regions. In many of those areas, it now looks unlikely that any wall will be completed.
