7-Mile Border Wall Expansion Begins in Arizona

Arizona shares a border of about 370 miles with Mexico.

Construction of another seven miles of Arizona’s southern boundary wall began on Sunday.

Homeland Security Secretary Christie Noem announced the expansion of the unfinished wall in an X video statement.

“In this place you can see where the boundary wall ends,” Noem said. “As of today, we are beginning a new seven-mile construction. We are going to continue to keep America safe again.”

Arizona shares a border of about 370 miles with Mexico.

During his first term, Trump built more than 450 miles of new and exchange walls along the southern border.

After President Joe Biden took office in 2021, he halted the construction of the wall, leaving billions of dollars worth of construction on the southern border wall unfinished.

Biden took a very different approach, addressing Vice President Kamala Harris “the root cause of displacement and migration.”

When Trump ran for the second term, he pledged to build a wall he began as part of his larger campaign to crack down on illegal immigration.

In an executive order on the first day of his second term, Trump directed both the Secretary of Defense and Homeland Security to take action “building temporary and permanent physical barriers to ensure full operational control of the US southern border.”

Vice President JD Vance said earlier this month that Trump’s goal is to complete a physical boundary wall separating the United States and Mexico by the end of his term.

“I think the president’s hope is to build an entire border wall by the end of his term,” Vance said during a visit to the border in Eagle Pass, Texas. “And of course, it is a physical structure, the boundary wall itself.

Vance also said artificial intelligence technology will be deployed across the southern boundary wall to support law enforcement.

Trump emphasizes that his administration has been successful in securing the southern border to date.

The White House said illegal border crossings in February fell 94% from last February, down 96% from the Biden administration’s history high.

“The Democratic media and our friends kept saying we needed new laws. We must have laws to ensure borders,” Trump said in his address to the Congressional Joint Congress. “But at the end of the day, all we needed was a new president.”

Last year, Trump urged Republicans to block a Democratic-led border package that had shoehorned $60 billion for Ukraine.

“We need another border and immigration bill. It should not be bound by foreign aid in any way, or in any way!” Trump wrote in the Truth Social Post in February 2024.

Meanwhile, US Customs and Border Protection recently awarded Trump’s first border wall contract for the second term.

Customs and Border Protection said in a statement on March 15 that the contract was granted to Granite Construction Co., which built a new border wall of about seven miles in Hidalgo County, Texas. Officials say the area is known to have numerous illegal entries and drug smuggling.

“Completing boundary walls in these locations supports the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) capabilities and disrupts and rejects illegal border crossings and cartel drug and human crowding activities,” the agency said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.