At half a mile a week, Gov. Greg Abbott's border wall will take around 30 years and $20 billion to build

BY JASPER SCHERER
JULY 3, 2024

Three years after Gov. Greg Abbott announced Texas would take the extraordinary step of building a state-funded wall along the Mexico border, he has 34 miles of steel bollards to show for it.

That infrastructure — which has so far run up a price tag of some $25 million per mile — isn’t yet a contiguous wall. It has gone up in bits and pieces spread across at least six counties on Texas’ 1,254-mile southern border. Progress has been hampered by the state’s struggles to secure land access, one of myriad challenges signaling a long and enormously expensive slog ahead for Abbott.

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Still, no Texas Republican has voted against border wall funding. Lawmakers approved nearly $2.5 billion for the effort in the state’s current two-year budget — more than was allotted in state funds to all but a handful of state agencies, and more than twice what Texas spends on its court and juvenile justice systems. (Emphasis mine.)

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Sooo. Our maternal deaths are increasing; our infant mortality rates are increasing; we rank 41/42 in school funding; we lack access in pre and post natal care in large areas; our sales and property taxes are some of the highest in the nation.

This is what the rest of you can expect from a Republican sweep in November.