OK enough article on DHS tour of Yuma AZ with 5 border wall systems with 25 miles done so far. Senator Martha McSally on site. Lots of pictures.
The $228.6 million to replace 22 miles of fencing in San Luis came from funds that Congress appropriated in the 2018 budget. Another $121 million to replace the 5 miles at the Colorado River that Wolf visited on Friday came from Pentagon funds that allow the military to build barriers in high trafficking areas.
The fate of the remaining three projects with a combined estimated value of $530 million is still uncertain. That money would cover the construction of 64 miles of 30-foot bollards along the Barry Goldwater Bombing Range and the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge in Yuma County.
Those big runs of barrier through the Goldwater Range and the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, are among the 11 projects (175 miles in total), that this $3.6 billion was for.
All those projects can now move ahead.
Yuma has historically been the third heaviest trafficked corridor for illegals, after the Rio Grande Valley and San Diego.
Not only Yuma City, but the whole Yuma Sector of the Border, is getting lavishly built up with Trump-style Super Barrier - most of it thirty footers, a lot of it double layer Wall system, like in San Diego.
San Diego is scheduled to complete this month, Yuma is about half done (and going gangbusters), while the RGV is just starting up (but fully funded and contracted). So the biggest corridors historically, are scheduled to be buttoned up like never before, by the end of this year - plus hundreds more of the highest priority miles.
On top of this tidal wave of new border barrier, the President just got another $1.4 billion in FY2020 appropriation, and retained the authority to dip into Military accounts again - so billions more are likely coming.
If President Trump taps other sources this year, like he did in 2019 ($6.7 billion extra), it would come to $18 billion total in his first term - inside the range of estimates for the total cost for the wall.