Drove by sections of the new wall there last week. So wonderful to see it! I can’t even describe how I felt.
Business owners in Columbus are crying now over lost business from moving the workers. That town has quite a sordid history with the border issues. Search Columbus New Mexico Air Force. For more recent history search Columbus NM gun smuggling, then stash house. Remember population is currently around 1600 and most are life long and multi-generational residents. Looking into the history of that town it is pretty easy to see why they don’t want a wall or anything else to secure the border.
The media flocks there to get perspective from people who live on the border about border issues when the border is a hot topic. What a joke.
The business owners in Columbus got screwed - a hundred well paid construction workers with big appetites and flush with overtime pay would have been spending like sailors.
The Administration has a new web page up (https://www.cbp.gov/border-security/along-us-borders/border-wall-system ) that can give you pretty detailed GPS coordinates of where the currently funded new Wall is planned to go.
Looks like the East/West stretches of border will get done (except for the steeper mountainous parts at the bottom of the Bootheel), but the North/South run of the bootheel border is not currently planned for new barrier.
The last $3.6 billion (2020 Military Construction money) has not yet been transferred, so there could still be some additional projects added later this year. There is a chance that that last $3.6 billion might not get transferred, and what is shown on the map at that web page could be the whole build.
Did you get up close to any of the thirty footers? I wonder if they are as impressive in person, as I assess they would be. Eighteen footers, with concertina on top, seem like showstoppers to me, for normal people.
The era of casual cross-border traffic is over, where this new Wall System goes in.