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Texas appears to have quietly stopped funding its plans to construct its own border wall with Mexico, which could mark the end of an embarrassing boondoggle designed to bolster one of President Donald Trump’s early campaign slogans.
For years, conservatives have framed the idea of a border wall as essential to immigration enforcement, despite a chorus of critics denouncing it as costly and ineffective. And Texas Republicans’ decision to defund the project seems like a tacit acknowledgment of that reality.
The Texas Tribune was first to report that a new state budget signed into law earlier this month includes no money for the wall, which was envisioned as covering more than 800 miles. But only a fraction of that was ever completed — at great cost to taxpayers.
Four years after Gov. Greg Abbott announced Texas would be the first state to build its own border wall, lawmakers have quietly stopped funding the project, leaving only scattered segments covering a small fraction of the border.
That decision, made in the waning hours of this year’s legislative session, leaves the future of the state wall unclear. Just 8% of the 805 miles the state identified for construction is complete, which has cost taxpayers more than $3 billion to date. The Texas Tribune reported last year that the wall is full of gaps that migrants and smugglers can easily walk around and mostly concentrated on sprawling ranches in rural areas, where illegal border crossings are less likely to occur.
Some Texas Republicans seem intent on spinning this retreat from their ill-conceived idea as a victory of sorts, or at least downplaying it as a sign of GOP backtracking. A spokesperson for Gov. Greg Abbott told the Tribune that the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown has allowed the state to adjust its enforcement plans. And state Sen. Joan Huffman, the state’s lead budget writer, told the outlet that rather than paying for the wall, the budget authorizes money for state entities that are aiding Abbott’s immigration crusade: a controversial project known as Operation Lone Star, which also has been denounced as a tremendous waste of time and money.
The idea of a “big, beautiful wall” between the U.S. and Mexico has become deeply ingrained in the MAGA movement — Trump’s followers have used chants and costumes to celebrate it. And yet, the idea appears dead as a doornail in Texas, a state virtually under total Republican control.
And at this point, the scattered remains of the state’s border wall seem like little more than shrines to the president’s ignorant policies.