(NewsNation) — U.S. Customs and Border Protection has awarded a $70.2 million contract to close critical gaps in the border wall in the Rio Grande Valley sector of Texas. The gaps have been a traditional passageway for migrants entering the United States illegally and for Mexican cartels to smuggle illicit drugs into the country.
Construction on the border wall resumed with President Donald Trump back in the White House after work was halted during the Biden administration. The contract was the first awarded for wall construction during Trump’s second term and is part of a renewed effort by Trump to secure the nation’s southern border.
Crews are installing six-foot guardrails with 18-foot steel panels in Hidalgo County, Texas as part of the contract. CBP officials say that the construction will help agents prevent migrants from entering the country, but will also slow the flow of drugs and humans being smuggled across the U.S.-Mexico border.
Officials say that migrants and the cartels were taking advantage of open gaps in the wall after construction was stopped by former President Joe Biden. Biden issued an executive order that stopped construction of the border wall, which started during Trump’s first term in office.
In 2023, however, the Biden administration announced they had waived 26 federal laws in Texas to allow wall construction to continue, The Associated Press reported. Work on the wall resumed in McAllen, Texas, under Biden’s executive power after 245,000 illegal border entries took place during Fiscal Year 2023.
The $70.28 million contract was recently awarded to Granite Construction to complete a seven-mile stretch of the wall in Hidalgo County as Trump has prioritized closing the southern border to illegal crossings. The funding for the contract comes from CBP’s Fiscal Year 2021 budget after contracts for border wall construction were canceled by the Biden administration.
Border officials announced that 28,654 encounters took place along the southern border between migrants and border officials in February, compared to 81,528 in January. In the Rio Grande Valley sector, which has been a hotspot for migrant crossings since 2013, border encounters plummeted from 5,964 in January to 1,285 in February, according to CBP data.
The resumed border wall construction sends a clear message to migrants looking to enter the country illegally and to cartels, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem told NewsNation.
“They recognize that we’re enforcing our federal laws (and) that we’re not letting people just walk across the border anymore,” Noem said in an exclusive interview with NewsNation’s Ali Bradley. “You can see we mean business. We are building the wall, we are securing our borders and we’re not going to allow this illegal activity to continue.”
Similar work on the border wall is being done in Arizona. including in Nogales, which is another known hotspot for migrant crossings and cartel smuggling operations. Crews are working to close open gaps in the wall. In that sector, border encounters dropped by 89% in a year, plummeting from 3,923 border encounters in February 2024 to just 413 last month.
Noem said in a recent social media post that seven miles of the wall would be built where the structure ends.
Border officials told NewsNation that wall construction has not yet resumed in the Del Rio sector of Texas, where migrant encounters have dropped so significantly under Trump that it has not been made a priority at this time.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.