I’m assuming this is reporting new wall.
How much ‘old wall’ has been replaced?
The old stuff wasn’t really wall, more like a big line in the sand, but it seems to me that that mileage is equally important.
“I’m assuming this is reporting new wall.
How much ‘old wall’ has been replaced?”
It is hard to keep up with the changing number, and the Administration does not recognize the validity of the distinction, so it is not officially reported. The great bulk of the 300 miles completed, are in areas that had some kind of barrier before.
If illegal traffic in an area is high, it does not matter if there is ineffective barrier there, or no barrier - it needs effective new barrier, and that is what should get done first (even if Harpy Ann Coulter will complain).
When they build a mile of effective barrier, it is new, whether something was there before or not. When you buy a new car, or build a new deck, they are new - even if they replace an old one.
There was something before in most places that desperately needed a new effective barrier - except along the Rio Grande River in Texas. That is where you will see the great bulk of new barrier, where no barrier of any sort ever previously existed.
Now that more than 130 miles are awarded on contract down there, the number of such miles is creeping up each week, as well as in a smattering of other sites, like the extension of San Diego’s barrier over Otay Mountain in the East, to link up to the next run of pre-existing bollards.
As the project progresses down the priority list, an increasingly higher proportion will be in areas where nothing at all was ever installed before. But the first few hundred miles on the priority list, have always been high traffic routes (border cities and the Rio Grande Valley), so there has always been a need to mark and block those areas somehow, even if only with a strand of barbed wire and a sign.
Out of the more than 730 miles now funded (the highest priorities), well over 200 will be miles where nothing of any sort previously existed. Overwhelmingly, this will be in Texas, but some of the rougher terrain in the Western States is now also getting built where nothing was run before (typically just a few miles here or there, connecting or extending some of the long runs across the flat terrain).