First Border Wall Construction Contract Of Trump’s Second Term Announced
By John Oyewale, Daily Caller News Foundation | March 16, 2025
The first border wall contract of President Donald Trump’s second term, valued at approximately $70 million, was announced Saturday. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) said it awarded the contract, worth $70,285,846, to the Watsonville, California-based Granite Construction Co., mandating the company to erect “approximately seven miles of new border wall in Hidalgo County, Texas, within the U.S. Border Patrol’s (USBP) Rio Grande Valley (RGV) Sector.”
The areas the new wall is expected to close off were “critical openings in the border wall that were left incomplete due to cancelled contracts during the Biden Administration,” according to CBP.
Many illegal migrants, human traffickers and drug smugglers exploited the RGV sector — a situation which necessitated completing the border wall there, CBP said.
The border wall contract follows Trump’s executive orders declaring a national emergency at the southern border and securing the borders of the U.S. The orders direct “the DHS [Department of Homeland Security] Secretary to take all appropriate actions to deploy and construct physical barriers to ensure complete operational control of the southern border of the United States,” CBP said.
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem visited the southern border Saturday. “Everybody, I’m here in Arizona, and right at this spot you can see where the border wall ends,” she says in a video statement recorded at the border. “As of today, we’re starting seven new miles of construction. We’re going to continue to make America safe again.”
Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard jointly visited the southern border earlier. In response to a question from The Daily Caller about how much of the wall the Trump administration was looking to build, Vance said the administration hoped to build the entire wall.
The Trump administration announced the completion of 450 miles of “new border wall system” in early January 2021, shortly before the Biden administration took office, the Department of Homeland Security noted at the time.
Former President Joe Biden terminated Trump’s 2019 declaration of a national emergency at the southern border and paused construction of the wall, dismissing walling off the entire stretch of the southern border as “not a serious policy solution” and the national emergency as “unwarranted”.
Missouri and Texas immediately sued the Biden administration, and Missouri obtained a court order compelling Biden to restore the $1.4 billion funding for the construction effort.
Congressional investigators later ruled the suspension of the border wall contract was legal — but the ruling drew objection from Republican lawmakers, according to CBS News.
Encounters at the southern border plummeted to lows not seen since the 1980s by the second month of Trump’s second term.
John Oyewale is a contributor at the Daily Caller News Foundation
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