“The Arizona border will have 32 miles of existing wall replaced starting next April,” the Washington Examiner reports. “The $324 million project has been given the green light by federal immigration officials, U.S. Customs and Border Protection announced Thursday.”
News of the project comes just on the heels of word that a few of the migrants from the notorious Central American “caravans” were spotted climbing the US-Mexico border fence in Tijuana earlier this week:
“Authorities were struggling to deal with the group of 357 migrants who arrived in Tijuana aboard nine buses Tuesday and immediately went to a stretch of border fence to celebrate,” the Associated Press reported.
“With a total of three caravans moving through Mexico including 7,000 to 10,000 migrants in all, questions arose as to how Tijuana would deal with such a huge influx, especially given U.S. moves to tighten border security and make it harder to claim asylum.”
The $324 million dollar US plan “will switch out an old barrier that runs from the Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector west into the Yuma Sector, which is just miles from Arizona’s border with California. The replacement wall is meant to keep pedestrians and vehicles from entering the U.S. Older barriers were largely to prevent cars from driving over, but were only a few feet tall and did little to keep people from trespassing from Mexico.”
“The undertaking, which will be paid for by congressional funding for CBP from 2018 legislation, is part of President Trump’s January 2017 executive order to secure the country by improving barriers in vulnerable and high-traffic areas.”
Read the Examiner’s full report here: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/trump-administration-greenlights-324m-border-wall-in-arizona
