The United States government is planning to paint the entire southern border with Mexico black to make the structure hot to the touch and further deter people from trying to climb it.
The announcement for the project came Tuesday, with Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem saying the idea is the brainchild of U.S. President Donald Trump.
“It’s tall, which makes it very, very difficult to climb, almost impossible. It also goes deep into the ground, which would make it very difficult, if not impossible, to dig under. And today we are also going to be painting it black,” Noem said during a news conference in Santa Teresa, New Mexico, as she stood in front of the enormous, slatted steel structure.
“That is specifically at the request of the president, who understands that in the hot temperatures down here, when something is painted black, it gets even warmer, making it even harder for people to climb,” she continued.
U.S. Border Patrol Chief Mike Banks, who attended the event with Noem, said the paint would also help deter rust.
Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act — a sprawling collection of tax breaks, spending cuts and other Republican priorities, including new money for national defence and deportations, signed into law earlier this summer — will help the government continue construction on the wall, which began during Trump’s first term, Noem said.
“We had an incredible amount of resources allocated to us in the ‘big, beautiful bill,’ because that’s going to allow us to continue construction.
“Construction right now is at the pace of a little bit less than a half a mile a day. And the border wall will look very different based on the topography and the geography of where it is built,” she said.
During Trump’s first term, building the wall was a central focus of his hardline immigration policy. During his second term, his mass deportation agenda with arrests in the interior of the country has been the main focus, but Homeland Security will be getting about US$46 billion to complete the wall as part of new funding passed by Congress this summer.
Noem said that in addition to barriers like the one she visited on Tuesday, the department is also working on “water-borne infrastructure.”
Long sections of the roughly 3,220-kilometre border between the U.S. and Mexico sit along the Rio Grande River in Texas.