The president's supporters saw them as a symbol of his commitment to border security. His detractors saw them as monuments to wasted taxpayer dollars. Now, the border wall prototypes are being reduced to rubble. READ MORE:
The top tube of a border wall prototype falls during demolition at the border between Tijuana, Mexico, and San Diego, Wednesday, Feb. 27, 2019, in San Diego. The government is demolishing eight prototypes of Donald Trump's prized border wall that instantly became powerful symbols of his presidency when they were built nine months after he took office.
Within about two hours, a hydraulic jackhammer on an excavator leveled seven prototypes. Concrete slabs crashed in clouds of dust, steel panels were knocked over and an owl flew out of a steel tube atop one panel just before it thundered down. The jackhammer was unable to immediately knock down one panel in what was expected to be a one-day job.
Removal of prototypes made way to extend a second-layer barrier of steel poles topped by a metal plate rising 30 feet from the ground, the same design being used elsewhere on the border. The new barrier vaguely resembles some of the steel prototypes but looks nothing like the solid concrete panels, which were widely panned because border agents couldn’t see what was happening on the other side.
The Department of Homeland Security redirected $20 million from its budget in February 2017, a month after Trump took office, to pay for the prototypes and smaller mock-ups built farther from the border that have also been dismantled. Open bidding generated a wide range of ideas, some of them whimsical or far-fetched. One bidder wanted a wall large enough for a deck that would offer tourists scenic views of the desert.
Ross Wilkin, a Border Patrol spokesman, noted that authorities never claimed the prototypes would be impenetrable and that they simply wanted to know how much time it took to crack each one.
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