Vice President JD Vance announced Wednesday that President Trump hopes to complete the construction of a “physical” boundary wall that spans the entire US Mexico border by the end of his second term.
“I think the president's hope is to build an entire border wall by the end of his term,” the vice president said in a statement at Eagle Pass, Texas.
“And of course, it's a physical structure, the boundary wall itself,” Vance pointed out.
Vance, who was joined by Director of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegses and National Intelligence Director Tarsi Gabbard for tours of the border, also promoted “great technical tools” available to prevent illegal border crossings.
“For example, it's a camera, not a person, but a huge number of great artificial intelligence-enabled technologies that allow cameras that are about to cross the southern border to pick up a camera two miles away,” the Vice President said.
“We use artificial intelligence to make us better with our border enforcement work, but we need to make sure that technology is deployed across the southern border of the United States,” he added. “We're trying to do it as broadly as possible, as we can, because that's how we protect the safety of Americans.”
In the first day's executive order, Trump instructed Hegses and Secretary of Homeland Security Christa Noem to “take all appropriate measures to deploy and build temporary and permanent physical barriers to ensure full operational control of the US southern border.”
Trump's order required that “physical walls and other barriers” be “supervised and supported by appropriate personnel and technology.”
In his first term, Trump built more than 450 miles of new and exchange walls along the southern border.
Plans were in place to build an additional 300-mile border wall before Trump was defeated by former President Joe Biden in the 2020 election.
Biden refused to complete Trump's vision and instead rusted taxpayer-funded wall components worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
The Biden administration reportedly spent the last few weeks quietly using materials for the southern boundary wall at auction, with bids 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 materials ahead of Trump's inauguration.
