Among the many lies that Donald Trump told during his Saturday rally in Waco, Texas, was his ongoing claim that he kept his promise to build a wall on the southern border and force Mexico to pay for it. It didn’t happen before he left office on Jan. 20, 2021.
CNN’s Daniel Dale listed off a few of the lies that Trump told his Texas audience, but the main one was that he both built the wall and somehow still needed to finish the job.
“I built hundreds of miles of wall and completed that task totally as promised,” Trump told the audience. “And then I began to add even more wall in areas where it was needed.”
If he “completed that task totally as promised,” why was it necessary to “add even more wall?”
Trump built a small piece of his so-called “wall,” which he claimed would be a concrete wall along the entire 2,000-mile border of the U.S. and Mexico. It turned out to be more like a fence. A 2020 BBC fact-check explained that George W. Bush and previous congresses had funded a lot of the structure and maintenance of it.
He got about $5 billion from Congress for the fence, and he took an additional $10 billion from the Department of Defense budget, the fact-check continued. As of the time Trump left office, there were about 40 miles of his fencing that had been built, FactCheck.org explained.
An unpublished memo from U.S. Customs and Border Protection was leaked in March 2022, The Washington Post reported. Among the details that were revealed were that the so-called “impenetrable” Trump border wall had been crossed more than 3,200 times before Trump left office. Agents confessed that there were people slicing through the steel with a saw that could be purchased at a big box store.
A New York Times photo of one stretch of fence Trump built shows it starting at some point along a hill and going along to the other side. One could simply walk around the fence.
