Vice President JD Vance revealed Wednesday that President Trump hopes to complete construction on a “physical” border wall spanning the entire US-Mexico boundary by the end of his second term.
“I think the president’s hope is that by the end of the term we build the entire border wall,” the vice president said during remarks in Eagle Pass, Texas — a hot spot for human and drug smuggling during former President Joe Biden’s term in office.
“And of course that’s the physical structure, the border wall itself,” Vance noted.
Vance, who was joined by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard for a tour of the southern border, also touted the “good technological tools” available to prevent illegal border-crossings.
“So many great artificial intelligence-enabled technologies that allow us, for example — a camera, not a person, but a camera picks up somebody two miles away who’s about to come across the southern border,” the vice president said.
“We’re using artificial intelligence to make us better at the job of border enforcement, but we’ve got to make sure that technology is deployed across the entire American southern border,” he added. “We’re going to do it as much as we can, as broadly as we can, because that’s how we’re going to protect the American people’s security.”
In a Day One executive order, Trump directed Hegseth and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to “take all appropriate action to deploy and construct temporary and permanent physical barriers to ensure complete operational control of the southern border of the United States.”
Trump’s order mandated that the “physical wall and other barriers” be “monitored and supported by adequate personnel and technology.”
In his first term, Trump built over 450 miles of new and replacement wall along the southern border.
Plans were in place to construct an additional 300 miles of border wall before Trump lost the 2020 election to former President Joe Biden.
Biden refused to complete Trump’s vision and instead left hundreds of millions of dollars worth of taxpayer-funded wall components to rust.
The Biden administration reportedly spent its final weeks quietly putting unused southern border wall materials up for auction, with bidding starting at just $5.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton secured a court order against the Biden administration last December preventing the sale of unused border wall material ahead of Trump’s inauguration.
