Texas continues to build a US-Mexico border wall with leftover panels from Trump’s failed efforts. A total of $1 billion in state tax dollars has since been set aside for the Texas border wall, and the state has received $55.2 million in donations, enough for one mile.
Trump had promised his supporters an “impenetrable” border wall between the United States and Mexico, that Mexico would pay for. President Trump’s administration built 52 miles of the new wall, most of the existing wall was built under former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Under Trump, each mile of his border wall cost the American taxpayer $46 million.
Mexican smugglers cut through Trump’s wall 3,272 times over three years, according to The Washington Post. In some cases, they replaced the areas they cut with tinted putty, essentially creating secret passages.
Now Governor Greg Abbott has appointed a Border Czar to oversee the issues of illegal border crossings into Texas. Most of the asylum seekers trying to make the illegal entry are from Nicaragua, Venezuela, Mexico, Ecuador and Colombia. 64% of those people were single adults. Almost a third, 49,508, were families with kids and another 8,059 were unaccompanied minor children traveling alone, according to data obtained by the New York Post.
The new Border Czar, Mike Banks, a retired longtime U.S. Border Patrol agent, will also be tasked with helping to convince private landowners to give the state access to their property to build more miles of border barrier.
Banks said he will work to make Texas "the least desirable place" to cross the border. He said enforcement must be "more aggressive."
Abbott has previously asked that the Biden administration enforce existing laws against illegal immigration. And since last year, Abbott has had more than 16,000 migrants bused from the border and taken to the cities of Washington, New York, Chicago and Philadelphia.
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