President Donald Trump is accelerating his effort to finish his border wall and setting an ambitious goal of completing it by the end of his administration. He’ll need landowners whose property runs along the US-Mexico border to hand over their land to finish it.
Over recent months, the Department of Justice has been hiring attorneys whose primary job includes invoking eminent domain to seize private land for the administration to build barriers. It’s an acknowledgement of the reality federal officials face along certain parts of the border, primarily in Texas, where a lot of the land is not federally owned.
“It’s taken too long to buy land at the pace they’re building. They’re running out of land faster than they can get land,” a former Homeland Security official familiar with the current efforts told CNN.
The US-Mexico border is 1,954 miles long. By the end of the Trump administration, officials project that around 1,400 miles of that will be covered with barriers, with additional miles reinforced with technology. It’s an enormous task that will require the administration to build around 775 miles of new wall by the end of 2027, and several hundred more miles of secondary and waterborne barrier by the end of 2028. Former and current US Customs and Border Protection officials say they’re on track to achieve it.
