Report: Only Fraction of Planned Texas Wall Built

Texas has spent billions of dollars on building its own border wall in the three years since Gov. Greg Abbott inaugurated the first 880-foot stretch in December 2021, but so far, just 50 miles of the 805 miles the state planned has been built.

And of that wall, totaling just 6% of the project's total, none of it is in a single structure but is fractured across six counties, allowing migrants to walk around it rather than attempting to climb over it, according to an extensive report from The Texas Tribune on Thursday.

Some of the segments that have been completed take up no more space than a city block, while other segments are located more than 70 miles apart.

The construction has come at a high price, between $17 million and $41 million per mile, according to state engineers.

The Tribune reports that the state has kept secret the locations of where it has been building its border wall, spending its own money rather than relying on what had historically been the responsibility of the federal government.

The state has acquired land to build another 15 miles of wall. Some of the Texas-Mexico border is either already covered with federally built walls or encompasses land with terrain that is unable to be crossed.

A large part of the issue is that many landowners along the border are hesitant to allow the state to construct segments of the wall on their property, according to officials.

Texas has asked hundreds of property owners to sign easement contracts and accept a one-time fee for the rights to a strip of land for the wall.

The state legislature has prohibited the use of eminent domain for the project, meaning private land can't be seized in the way it would be for other infrastructure projects such as bridges and roads.

The state is currently trying to acquire 165 miles of border property, but at least a third of the landowners don't want to sell, according to a firm overseeing the land acquisition.

Mike Novak, executive director of the Texas Facilities Commission, said that getting the land is the most difficult part of completing the wall project.

Border security experts reviewing the Tribune's findings say that since the wall's construction depends on where the state can buy land, sections of the wall aren't going up in places where illegal crossings can be stopped.

It also means that the wall segments are going up on ranch property in rural areas rather than in urban locations, where it is easier for immigrants to disappear once they've come into the U.S.

"This seems to be dictated more by just who has been able to grant [Abbott] permission than anything particularly strategic because a lot of these places are very sparsely populated," said Adam Isacson, a regional security expert at the Washington Office on Latin America, a research and advocacy organization commented.

But Mike Banks, the Texas border czar, said the sites were chosen in rural areas because they were located in places where they can intercept the migrants who are trying to avoid detection.

The state has acquired 94 land agreements, with less than one-third in the state's border cities.

Some places, like El Paso, have sections of federally built wall, but others like Loredo have no barriers.

Texas officials have not revealed the location of wall sections, whether complete or with construction underway, but the Tribune identified wall sections and land planned for future construction by reviewing state contracts and cross-referencing the data with district records and mapping software.

Abbott declined a request for an interview, but Banks spoke with the newspaper, praising the wall project as being effective and pointing in declines among migrant encounters and "got-aways."

Encounters decreased in all nine Border Patrol sectors, not only in places in Texas where the new state wall has gone up, according to data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection.