Wall of Waste: Border rancher wanted Trump wall, Biden left him 'rusting' field of steel

DEMING, New Mexico — Millions of dollars of steel are wasting away in the high desert after being neglected by the federal government for two and a half years since President Joe Biden halted Trump-era border wall construction.

In the 901 days since Biden took office, not one has gone by that fourth-generation cattle rancher Russell Johnson has driven his truck down the dirt roads behind his house and not been greeted by fields of construction materials that have been left behind and forgotten by construction crews.

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The countless steel beams, each more than 30 feet long, that sit all over the property are not even the worst part — it's the gaping, nearly mile-long hole in the border wall just a few hundred feet behind it.

"I'd much rather see this going in gaps than just sitting out here," Johnson said during a July tour of his land that he says has become the federal government's "warehouse" for materials from canceled projects.

Border residents like Johnson cannot physically or legally move what was left behind in various spots up and down the 1,950-mile U.S.-Mexico border, and that has limited where Johnson's livestock can graze. It is also an "eyesore" in a beautiful landscape and a reminder of the government's failure to clean up what it left behind.

"I don’t think they have any idea," Johnson said when asked if the White House or Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas knew about the abandoned materials. "Secretary Mayorkas has never been out here."

Promised a wall, left with a backyard wasteland

The 30-foot-tall wall runs 100 miles along Highway 9 from El Paso, Texas, west into central New Mexico, where it gives way to a giant opening on Johnson's property that runs along the border. Nearly a mile of his more than eight miles of land has no wall.

In January 2021, after Biden took office, workers literally walked off the job site and never returned. The $15 billion in funding for roughly 740 miles of the wall meant each mile of the project averaged about $20 million. Trump completed 450 miles, leaving roughly 290 miles worth of projects unfinished, including Johnson's mile-long gap and an expensive pile of materials that taxpayers had prepaid.

In the two and a half years since Johnson first shared his disappointment about being left with a hole in the wall on his land, drug smugglers and Mexican cartels have jumped at the opportunity to use this spot, as well as a smaller gap no more than 20 feet wide, to seep into the U.S. almost undetected. Johnson's deer cameras have captured many such crossings by day and night, according to images shared with the Washington Examiner.

Johnson said U.S. Customs and Border Protection installed a gate in the smaller gap within the last two weeks, but the consequences linger of it being open for so long.

Weathered, man-made foot trails that lead away from the smaller gap in the wall were still visible in the area, not a far walk from Johnson's house.

Johnson, who gave up his job as a Border Patrol agent in 2016 to return to the family's cattle business, had been excited when he learned that the wall was going in, not only because it would block illegal immigration and drug smuggling.

The portion of the wall that was installed in place of barbed wire fencing was a huge relief for ranchers like Johnson for how it would prevent cattle in Mexico from slipping into the U.S. through fencing that was cut by smugglers.

"One thing this wall has done is alleviated the responsibility off of us in maintaining an international boundary," Johnson said. "Anybody that ranched along the border that had barbed wire fence — you were basically the first line of security between any [livestock] disease or outbreak of any sort coming out of Mexico into the U.S. And a lot of people don’t realize that, even within our own industry, the ranchers along the border were keeping not just our ranches safe but our industry as a whole because we were maintaining that."

'Rusting away'

The backyard wasteland is filled with hundreds, if not thousands, of once-pristine eight-foot-wide panels of slatted steel beams.

The nearly mile-long gap in the wall that runs over the Chepas Mountain was chiseled down in the Trump era to make the grade less steep for vehicles. In preparation for the wall, the massive rocks from the mountainside were moved to the field of materials and were supposed to be crushed into gravel and used for all-weather roads along the wall to improve Border Patrol agents' safety while driving.

"What was nice about it was none of it was going to go to waste," Johnson said.

Instead, piles of rock and gravel remain in two spots nearby, on Johnson's ranch and his neighbor's land. Nearby, construction crews are paving cement roads over the Chepas Mountain with canceled wall funds, part of the environmental, safety, and remediation projects that DHS said it would use the Trump-era wall funding to build instead of finishing nearly 300 miles worth of canceled barrier.

Other projects, such as installing culverts under floodgates to ensure water can flow through, are being added. Dozens of floodgates in the wall are welded shut and frequently cut off by smugglers who break through. Permanent locks on the gates have yet to be installed, Johnson said.

Two broken promises

Not only did the Biden administration choose not to complete the project, Russell said, but no one has communicated to him what will happen with the materials or a plan to restore acres of his land to its healthy condition that cattle can graze on.

In March 2022, CBP proposed plans to wrap up the projects, which spanned across much of New Mexico and into Western Texas.

The project was funded by money that Trump redirected from the Department of Defense after he declared a national emergency, which legally allowed him to redirect funding from outside the DHS to building a wall. The wall money for this particular project was pulled from 10 U.S.C. § 284 Counter Narcotics budget.

CBP's proposal stated that steel bollards would be capped, retention ponds backfilled, gaps closed and gates installed, drainage systems completed, erosion control measures implemented, and “disturbed areas” would be replanted.

As part of its proposal, CBP also vowed to clean up any sites where materials remained.

“All construction materials will be removed,” CBP wrote in its remediation plan. It identified construction materials as “construction vehicles, tools, rebar metal, steel bollards, barbed wire fencing, etc., left behind from construction activities.”

Staging areas, or areas used to store materials and vehicles to be used in constructing the border barrier, were to be “removed” and “restored to a condition prior to construction.”

The piles of rock and debris from construction activities also “will be removed,” the plan stated.

CBP awarded the first of its remediation contracts for the New Mexico projects in September 2022. Work was expected to begin in October or November 2022 and be completed between November 2023 and May 2024.

"It just doesn’t sit well with me that this is taxpayer money just sitting out here and rusting away in the New Mexico desert," Johnson said. "This is brand-new metal. It’s already been fabricated and stuff, ready to be installed in the border wall, but the government, rather than putting it in and installing it like it was intended to be, they’re going to sell it for scrap, which is going to ... make this worth pennies on the dollar compared to what it could have been.

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"I’d much rather see Texas get to use it or Arizona, anybody that's willing to take it to install it on the border, rather than sending it to scrap," Johnson said.

The DHS and CBP did not respond to requests for comment.