Trump claimed credit for border wall section built under Bush

Standing next to the rust-colored steel border wall, near the Coronado National Memorial in Cochise County, Donald Trump and his supporters touted what they called the "Trump wall" during the Republican presidential nominee's Aug. 22 media event. 

“To my right is what we call ‘Trump wall,’” said Paul Perez, president of the Border Patrol union. “This is wall that was built under President Trump.”

“All of this wall was built at great expense,” Trump told reporters, at the same border site where his vice presidential nominee JD Vance appeared on Aug. 1. “We built hundreds of miles of this, by the way. As far as the eye can see, you look in the other direction, as far as the eye can see.”

But it turns out this stretch of border wall was funded and constructed during the administration of George W. Bush, in 2008. The Washington Post first reported the discrepancy.

The Trump administration did add some wall construction at the far end of this segment of the wall, where it comes to an abrupt stop along the steep mountainside west of where Trump was speaking, said Myles Traphagen, borderlands program coordinator for the Wildlands Network, which works to preserve nature in the U.S., Mexico and Canada.

In the last six months of 2008, the Bush administration built 6 miles of border wall, stretching from the western edge of the San Pedro River to the Coronado National Memorial where Trump appeared, Traphagen said.

The bollard-style wall here is 18 feet tall rather than 30 feet, like the wall installed under Trump.

The scene where Trump intended to highlight his “big, beautiful wall” last week ended up spotlighting the cumulative work of earlier presidential administrations that signed legislation leading to permanent barriers along the U.S. and Mexico’s 2,000-mile border. The work largely started with President Bill Clinton in the 1990s, when fence construction relied on surplus material from the Vietnam War.

The media event also shone a light on the challenges, and in some cases impossibility, of constructing an uninterrupted barrier between the countries, due to geographic, climatic and other factors, including Tohono O’odham Nation ancestral lands that transcend the border in Arizona.

Just east of where Trump held his media event, large floodgates were locked in the open position to accommodate powerful floodwaters and debris that would otherwise topple the wall during monsoon season. A few strings of barbed wire were stretched across the large openings.

Neither the Trump campaign nor the Border Patrol union responded to the Arizona Daily Star’s request for comment.

Effectiveness debated

Wall construction along the southern border accelerated under Bush, after the passage of the Real ID Act of 2005. The law allowed an appointed secretary of the newly created Department of Homeland Security to waive all laws and environmental regulations to construct roads and barriers along U.S. borders. Then, the Secure Fence Act of 2006 authorized construction of 700 miles of fencing along the southern border.

The 2005 legislation, waiving normal regulatory processes, “is the crucial thing that makes border walls proliferate so rapidly,” said Traphagen of the Wildlands Network.

While Bush did use the waivers, granted by then-Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, his administration still engaged in “good-faith” environmental assessments, as outlined in a 2012 Customs and Border Protection environmental report on border wall projects, including the site Trump recently visited, Traphagen said.

Trump, on the other hand, “just blew through all the (conservation) laws and issued more waivers than anybody. They didn’t follow any of the rules,” he said.

The Obama administration finished up some of Bush’s unfinished wall projects, for about 70 additional miles of fencing mostly in Texas, Traphagen said.

Analysts and advocates say the addition of hundreds of miles of wall hasn’t reduced migrant arrivals, as evidenced by 2023’s record number of illegal crossings at the southern border, amid a global surge in migration.

“Border walls are more of a symbol than they are a policy solution,” Traphagen said. Migrant apprehensions, often used as a proxy for illegal immigration, “actually went up after the Trump administration built 458 miles of border wall. So from a cause-and-effect standpoint, the walls were completely ineffective. ... You can go over it, under it, around it, beneath it — choose your preposition.”

Other factors have had a more direct impact on the numbers in 2024: Migrant arrests have plummeted to the lowest level since 2020, following aggressive enforcement by Mexican authorities to prevent migrants from reaching the U.S. border, and since the Biden administration’s June executive order restricting asylum access took effect.

Gail Kocourek of migrant-aid group Tucson Samaritans said Biden’s restrictions on asylum — already facing a court challenge from human-rights advocates who say they’re illegal and cruel — has had a greater impact on migrant arrivals than additional border barriers.

In her humanitarian trips to the border, Kocourek has seen evidence of smugglers sawing through the wall’s bollards with hand-held power tools, and watched U.S. construction crews endlessly patch those cuts. Even the “anti-climbing” panels at the top of much of the border barrier don’t stop people from scaling it using ladders or ropes, she said.

But the 30-foot height of Trump’s wall — compared to earlier 18-foot-tall models — does result in more severe fall injuries.

On Wednesday, near Sásabe, Arizona, Kocourek and other Samaritans tried to aid an injured Mexican man, an incident first reported by the Tucson Sentinel. The night before he had fallen from the top of the wall onto the southern side, where he was likely still on U.S. soil, she said. The border wall is built on the Roosevelt Reservation, with U.S. land on the southern side, rather than directly on the U.S.-Mexico border line.

The Arivaca Fire Department rendered first aid through the border wall. But the agency couldn’t retrieve the man — who had a severe, exposed leg break — until the wee hours of Thursday morning, when firefighters cut through the border wall in order to transport the man to a Tucson hospital, said Chief Tangye Beckham.

Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, associate policy analyst at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, agreed that border barriers have proven ineffective in stopping migration. But they can be a tool to channel migrants to areas where law enforcement could concentrate resources, she said.

“In some ways they can help operationally push people to certain areas of the wall,” she said. “But we also know that where people choose to cross is often influenced by a lot of different things,” including word of mouth, enforcement patterns in Mexico and smuggling organizations’ territory.

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A physical barrier “can have some efficacy for operational control, but it doesn’t necessarily stop movement of people,” she said.

Traphagen said the Bush administration was at least strategic in where it built, focusing on high-traffic areas where a wall would make an impact.

“Not that I’m a fan of border walls, but that area around Naco and the San Pedro (near where Trump’s event took place) was very well known for high trafficking” at the time Bush built the wall there, he said.

Trump’s wall construction was often rushed and construction contracts were issued without competitive bidding, he said. Hurried construction done without necessary erosion control has meant the Biden administration has been repairing multiple sections. Some of the steel bollards installed under Trump were hollow, instead of concrete-filled, making them less structurally sound, he said.

Conservationists have objected to the Biden administration’s continued wall construction in Texas and in Arizona, where it’s closed gaps left by the Trump administration, as well as the possibility that 1,800 stadium lights installed since 2019 along the border might be activated. That would severely impact endangered animals and migration routes, according to the Center for Biological Diversity.

Border barriers don’t address the trafficking activity that occurs at official U.S. ports of entry, where most drug smuggling attempts take place, usually by U.S. citizens.

But advocates say the border wall’s underlying strategy of “prevention through deterrence,” as it was termed under the Clinton administration, has also ended up channeling migrants to dangerously remote areas, leading to a dramatic rise in migrant deaths since the 1990s.

Border sheriffs differ in opinion

Arizona border sheriffs have differing takes on whether walls are effective in stopping crime or slowing migration.

Republican Cochise County Sheriff Mark Dannels, speaking at Trump’s Aug. 22 press event, highlighted “border-related crime” in his county. Most border-related crime there involves U.S. citizen suspects, county officials have said. Human smuggling attempts, which have resulted in fatalities stemming from high-speed chases, increasingly involve young Americans recruited by criminal organizations over social media.

“My community is tired. My community is frustrated,” Dannels said. “Over the last three and a half years, what we’ve dealt with in this county when it comes to crime, the policies (of the Biden administration) have failed this country. The policies have failed our citizens.”

Dannels said in the past 31 months, Cochise County has booked 3,762 people in the county jail for border-related crimes, and incurred related expenses of $12.5 million.

Arizona Department of Public Safety statistics are incomplete for 2024, but so far the data show both Arizona and Cochise County are on track to have lower levels of violent crime compared to each of the past four years.

In Cochise County, violent crime dropped from 189 reports in 2017 to 47 in 2019, then rose each year to reach 105 reports last year. Two-thirds of the way into 2024, there have been 32 violent crimes reported.

Dannels was unavailable for an interview late last week but said in a statement that border security requires a “comprehensive plan” and prioritization at all levels of government. Key strategies include physical border barriers, increased personnel levels, “virtual technology” and “the will to acknowledge, engage, prioritize border security, absent political affiliation,” he wrote.

For Democratic Santa Cruz County Sheriff David Hathaway, a native of Nogales, false descriptions of the borderlands as a “war zone” are aimed at inciting fear for political reasons. He noted that Santa Cruz county’s crime rate is lower than the state average.

The Nogales economy is heavily dependent on tourism from Mexico; strategies like lining the Nogales border wall with Concertina barbed wire discourage tourism, he said.

Politicians’ border-wall visits are largely performative, Hathaway said.

“They have a preconceived notion of why they’re here and they just want to get a picture to back up their politician rhetoric,” he said. “They don’t come here on a fact-finding mission.”

If asked, Hathaway said he’d tell politicians more border wall won’t stop irregular immigration.

“I would say they need to have a legitimate, robust guest-worker program,” he said, recalling the “Bracero” program that ended in the 1960s, which had allowed his ranching family to hire seasonal workers from Mexico when he was growing up.

Advocates say building and maintaining the wall drains public dollars that could more effectively reduce irregular border crossings if it were spent on creating more channels for asylum seekers and workers to enter the U.S. through ports of entry.

“Even if it were physically possible to build a wall all across the southern border, leveling mountains and bisecting sacred tribal lands, the wall and border road require constant maintenance — grading, erosion control, and trucking in of gravel and other materials,” said Laurie Cantillo, board chair and water-truck driver for nonprofit Humane Borders, which maintains water stations in the borderlands, aiming to prevent deaths of migrants, or anyone in need.

Construction of new roads in the rugged borderlands, to accommodate construction vehicles, ends up making it easier for smugglers to transport migrants by vehicle rather than on foot, she said.

“Billions of dollars are being wasted that could be better spent on a robust guest-worker program, faster processing of asylum claims and addressing the root causes of why people are forced to make the agonizing decision to leave their homes,” Cantillo said. “The border wall may slow people down, but as long as there are people fleeing desperate situations, they will always find a way to go over, under and through border walls. Unfortunately, in the process many are dying.”

Photos: Former President Donald Trump visits the Arizona/Mexico border