Here's a question for you: in addition to wiping out the East Wing of the White House to build his future ballroom and so much more, including the construction of a major triumphal arch in Washington (that will be wildly larger than the Arc de Triomphe in Paris), might Donald Trump consider building a wall around the White House to keep the president of the United States safe from migrants -- as well as anyone else who might ever want to remove him from office (even after election 2028)?
That thought, I must admit, crossed my mind as I read the striking piece that TomDispatch regular William deBuys has written on the vast wall that "our" president has been plowing through the wildlands along the U.S.-Mexican border. He is indeed the border-wall president. But as it happens, he's also been responsible for ensuring that ever fewer legal immigrants (like my own grandfather in the previous century) will be allowed into this country. In fact, asylum seekers legally entering the United States at that border fell in the second Trump term by 99.9% (from 40,000 as Joe Biden's presidency ended to just 26 in February 2025). These days, in fact, if you don't happen to be a White South African, forget about it. Of the 4,499 refugees who have arrived here since October 2025, only three weren't from South Africa and White. Imagine that!
As Eve Fairbanks wrote at the Guardian, President Trump "tweeted about the victimization of white South Africans during his first term, but in his second term, Trump issued an unprecedented executive order targeting the country. It cut US foreign assistance and made a startling exception to his general antipathy to immigrants by offering expedited refugee status to Afrikaners, the Dutch-descended white group that helped build the apartheid regime."
And with that in mind, let deBuys take you to our borderlands in person to see what Trump's America looks like if you don't happen to be a White Trump supporter from South Africa. Tom
The Never-ending Nightmare of the Border Wall
Flooded with Cash, Drained of Sense in Trump's America
A leading preoccupation of the first Trump administration has all but slipped from view. Except when ostensible conservatives speak out against it, the major media have scarcely breathed a word on the subject. But it's still there, 30 feet tall, aspirationally 1,952 miles long, obliterating habitats, dividing families, and sucking down public funds faster than a carrier-based air squadron.
The media's lack of attention is understandable. All-too-real wars of choice and metaphorical wars against science, universities, and the environment have dominated our airtime and the headlines. The rise of a new medievalism in medicine and the abrogation of international trade and security agreements have also won attention. Add to all of that a federal paramilitary kidnapping people, even from what still passes for the halls of justice, while murdering the occasional protester, and one's journalistic cup runneth over.
The meta-story of the U.S. government's comprehensive abandonment of its Enlightenment heritage needs telling, too. Goodbye to empiricism and the troublesome scientific discourse it produces. Goodbye as well to empiricism's political collaterals, including the "created equal" credo of the Declaration of Independence, which the current regime finds distinctly irritating. There is simply too much to report on as the new monarchy, as if in a sped-up nature film, blossoms flowerlike, its palace under renovation, the king's signature being prepared to grace the currency, and myriad kickback mechanisms whirring like gold-plated turbines to enrich an aristocracy of tech bros and oil emirs.
So, dear reader, it's not just logical but inevitable that Donald Trump's border wall, a major story during his first administration, has essentially fallen out of the news. Rest assured, though, that the world's least pragmatic and most performative construction project continues to prosper.
Spend Now, Think Later
Modern border management relies on three tools: human patrols, remote detection backed by quick response teams, and the construction of physical obstacles. Smart gatekeepers coordinate those tools to maximize effectiveness and minimize cost. But there's no need for thrift in Trumpworld. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, or OBBBA, which Trump signed into law last July 4th, negated all need for fiscal restraint. Among other things, it appropriated $46.55 billion for border wall construction, $7.8 billion for U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents and their vehicles, $6.2 billion for high-tech border surveillance, and a hefty $10 billion for anything else border-related. The total: $70.55 billion. Those funds will be available through Fiscal Year 2029. By comparison, the government will spend about $10 billion less over that same period to fund the entire Department of the Interior, which manages half a billion acres of surface land as well as the continental shelf and vast subsurface mineral deposits.
Such border largesse means that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) can go all-out on all three tactical approaches at the U.S.-Mexico border -- patrol, surveillance, and a wall -- simultaneously, without troubling to eliminate redundancies, tailor tactics to the environment, or streamline coordination. Daddy has proudly given DHS his credit card.
In a victory-lap cabinet meeting four days after enacting the OBBBA, Trump told Kristi Noem, then still his DHS secretary, "You're loaded up on the border." He essentially admitted that the bill's munificence demonstrated power, not budgetary acumen, simultaneously adding, "We had zero [migrants] come in last month, so I am not sure how much of it we want to spend. You may actually think about saving a lot of money because the wall is largely built." The president then continued with fact-free claims that the migrant population abounded with murderers and mental defectives.
Notwithstanding Trump's comments, DHS administrators and the contractors who are their most immediate constituents show no sign of leaving money on the table. At the border, their blank-check funding meets a matching regulatory void -- the most extensive waiver of laws and regulations in American history. In addition to suspending laws intended to protect the environment, wildlife, national parks, national wildlife refuges, lands sacred to Native Americans, and historic and cultural sites, the Trump administration has also waived more than 60 contracting and procurement regulations. In the name of a national emergency, which is no emergency at all -- illegal border crossings (as measured by apprehensions) have indeed plunged -- the president has stripped the playing field of all boundaries and opened the door to cronyism and corruption.
Under showers of money and in the absence of restraint, a single border wall is no longer viewed as adequate. Double-walling has become the norm and certain select areas now boast triple walls. With no cap on costs, whole mountaintops, rugged and unvisited, have been sheared apart to make way for the standard 30-foot-tall, steel-bollard wall, even at costs exceeding $41 million per mile, or almost $8,000 per foot. Meanwhile, the Border Patrol's terminally bored agents (giving new meaning to bored-er) sit behind the wall in white trucks, looking at their phones and incubating their hemorrhoids.
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