A busy section of Donald Trump’s southern border wall — which cost an astonishing $27 million a mile to build — is being foiled by inexpensive ladders, The Texas Monthly reported this week.
“Ladders and walls go together like peas and carrots,” explained one McAllen Border Patrol agent.
The typical wall-thwarting strategy along a stretch of the border in the Rio Grand Valley between Granjeno and Hidalgo, Texas, is wooden, about a dozen feet high with only six or so rungs.
“It’s made of cheap, rough wood, quickly nailed together because it is only going to be used once,” local artist and activist Scott Nicol told Texas Monthly. “Unlike the wall, these ladders are functional.” He estimates the materials for the most primitive wooden ladders cost about $5.
Some are higher and have more rungs, while ladders up river may be rope-and-PVC or rusted rebar ladders that hook to the top of the barrier. “Camouflage” rebar ladders blend in with the bollards of the barriers and are often left in place for repeated use, The El Paso Times reported last year. The materials for those ladders also cost about $5.
Nicol has photos of several dozen versions of ladders. They “show how absurd the idea is that a wall is going to stop anybody,” he said.
The artist has walked the border for years, searching out the ladders and anything else travelers leave behind. He spotted six discarded ladders during part of just one day with a reporter, and has spotted far more than usual in the last couple of months as the numbers of people secretly crossing the border soar. Border Patrol caught more than 171,000 migrants along the southern border in March, the highest one-month total in 15 years.
In yet another breach of the wall, some migrants are using an inexpensive power tool to saw out sections along the bottom to crawl through before replacing.
While agents admit the wall isn’t a total deterrent, it does stop many, and clearly would make travel by families and especially children more difficult. Recent terrifying videos show children being dropped from atop the barriers into U.S. territory.
The wall also slows progress, giving agents time to nab people attempting to enter the country, according to agents. Lately, though, they don’t have enough time to both process people at the border and apprehend those scaling the barrier.
“We have people turning themselves over, and at the same time, when it’s dark we have people with ladders, but we got nobody to go over because we’re tied up,” Chris Cabrera, a McAllen-based Border Patrol agent and spokesperson for the National Border Patrol Council union, told Texas Monthly.
Despite the massive $16 billion cost of Trump’s wall, using funds from Congress and diverting money from the Pentagon, the administration only managed to complete some 80 miles of new barrier, The Hill noted. An additional 400 miles of existing barriers were reinforced.
During his 2016 presidential campaign Trump promised to build 1,000 miles of border wall, which he vowed Mexico would pay for.
Read the entire Texas Monthly article here.
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