A Story of Waste, Fraud and Abuse as Texas Republicans Abandon Trump's Wall

After spending $3 billion on fragmented bits of a 'wall' in Texas, lawmakers have quietly dropped the idea. This is on top of the federal billions funneled to Trump/GOP donors in his first term.

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Found! Waste, fraud and abuse.

Remember The Wall? President Donald Trump’s signature campaign issue of 2016 is a forgotten bust of broken promises, wasteful spending and funneling cash to Republican donors, both on the federal and state level.

In Texas, Governor Abbott’s wasteful spending on a border “wall” cost taxpayers $3 billion, but only covers 8% of the 805 miles on which the state said it would build a wall, and now lawmakers are quietly walking away from what was Trump and Republicans’ platform just a few years ago.

Lawmakers in Texas have “quietly stopped funding the project… leaving only scattered segments covering a small fraction of the border,” Zach Despart for the Texas Tribune reported this week.

The parts of the “wall” that are built have gaps that are easy to walk through and are built mostly in areas where border crossings aren’t as likely to occur.

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.

“Texas will continue to maintain a robust presence with our federal partners to arrest, jail, and deport illegal immigrants,” Abbott’s spokesperson told the Tribune, seeming to suggest that arresting people will stand in for the wall.

Abbott had been asking for donations from the public for the wall, which raised more than $55 million, but this link was removed “sometime after May 29” according to the Texas Tribune.

At least one Republican lawmaker understood and had the courage at the time to point out that the wall was not going to work, but was rather more about giving the appearance of doing something.

Before he voted in favor of $1.5 billion for the wall in 2023, Sen. Bob Hall, R-Edgewood, wondered aloud whether the Legislature was “spending a whole lot of money to give the appearance of doing something rather than taking the problem on to actually solve it.”

Landowners Didn’t Want a Wall on Their Property

Landowners didn’t want a wall on their property, and in part because of this, the wall is not even “a contiguous structure, but dozens of fragmented sections scattered across the six counties between Del Rio and Brownsville.”

It seems like the issue of eminent domain was a foreseeable issue - especially for the party of “small” government, but maybe when one is grandstanding about their party’s signature issue and asking for donations, practicality isn’t advantageous.

In December of 2024, the Texas Tribune reported that Abbott held a press conference with “cameras zoomed tightly on him against a backdrop of the three-story high, slatted wall in Starr County,” declaring “the barrier to be impenetrable.”

Three years and $3.1 billion later, Abbott may be right. Migrants and smugglers aren’t breaching the bars. They don’t have to, because they can walk around them.

The way the cameras were zoomed in close is a bit of an uncomfortable metaphor for what we see in the national media now, which is using the tools of the trade to tell the story the politician wants told. While it’s important to tell good stories of policy success, if they had zoomed out it would have shown that people could just walk around the wall.

That is not a story about a success; it’s a story about a very expensive prop. It’s a story about waste and abuse.