The Atlantic has a piece about the sad, rusting remains of Trump's anti-immigration boondoggle, a southern border wall. Giant piles of construction materials in staging areas, worth at least a quarter billion dollars, rust away with no clear idea of what will happen to it all.
The border wall now runs much of the length of Arizona, which is where most of the construction took place over the past four years. One recent afternoon, as I passed through the shadows the wall was dropping on the road that runs along the border, evidence of construction lingered: a slowly dripping water truck, a gaggle of thickly dusted vehicles, a generator gone silent. The project had the strange quality of seeming like a fresh relic, unfinished and yet already bearing a patina of rust.
Down a little hump in the road from the wall near Guadalupe Canyon stood a fortress of bollards: 30 huge stacks forming a ring, in the center of which were piles of light poles, PVC piping, electrical wires, prefab concrete, tangles of steel mesh, and long snakes of steel rebar—all just sitting there.
Thumbnail image: US Border Patrol – DHS, United States Border Patrol, Public Domain.
