Biden Halts Border Wall Construction, Leaving Billions in Unfinished Contracts

On the eve of Joe Biden's inauguration, construction crews raced against the calendar at a place with its own symbolic weight: Friendship Park, a cross-border green space overlooking the Pacific that Pat Nixon had opened in 1971 as a gesture of international goodwill. There, workers were replacing a steel fence with imposing barriers—thirty-foot poles topped with flat steel plates—even as the new president prepared to take office. By Wednesday, Biden had signed an executive order pausing all wall construction, one of seventeen orders issued that first day, six of them addressing immigration. The pause left a landscape of unfinished work: billions of dollars still owed under existing contracts, crews standing down, equipment sitting idle across Arizona and Texas.

The numbers tell part of the story. Trump's administration had spent $6.1 billion of the $10.8 billion it had contracted to spend by the time Biden took office. The full slate of contracts, if completed, would have extended the wall to 664 miles. The total funding secured—$16.45 billion as of Biden's first day—came from multiple sources: $5.8 billion appropriated by Congress, the rest diverted from the Defense and Treasury departments. Trump had claimed 450 miles of new wall built and said he'd achieved that goal eight days before leaving office. The administration had notified Congress on January 14 of a new $863 million contract, though it was never awarded.

Biden's order gave his administration two months to calculate the cost of unwinding these contracts and to explore whether remaining funds could be redirected to other border infrastructure—roads, lighting, sensors, technology. The Senate Democratic aide tracking the contracts said fees would have to be negotiated with builders, and whatever money remained might be repurposed. Publicly, the Trump administration had claimed $15 billion for the wall; the actual figure was higher.

The work continued in fragments even as the transition happened. In Guadalupe Canyon in Arizona's easternmost reaches, an activist who documents wall construction saw dynamite charges being set Wednesday afternoon—the very day of the inauguration. Heavy machinery had been carving roads into rocky mountainsides, drilling holes for posts on Bureau of Land Management land. By Thursday, construction equipment sat idle in the Rio Grande Valley near Nogales, Arizona, the busiest crossing areas. But in San Diego, at Friendship Park specifically, crews were still working, replacing barriers with the new taller design. Dan Watman of Friends of Friendship Park said he'd been told about the project in a December call with Border Patrol agents but given no explanation for the accelerated timeline.

The wall itself had never been what Trump promised. He'd said it would be "virtually impenetrable" and that Mexico would pay for it—neither happened. Border Patrol officials acknowledged the barrier was designed not to stop crossings entirely but to slow them. Portions could be cut with power tools from hardware stores. In October, Jose Edgar Zuleta, a man whose jewelry business in Puebla had collapsed during the pandemic, used a special ladder to clear two walls at Friendship Park. He moved through brush in a heavily patrolled area for about thirty minutes before being detained. His twenty-one-year-old son, who had gone ahead, was picked up hours later.

Friendship Park itself carried historical weight beyond its current function. It had hosted yoga classes and concerts. In 2018, Attorney General Jeff Sessions held a news conference there to announce the "zero tolerance" policy that led to thousands of children being separated from their parents at the border. Since 2012, after a double wall was built at the park, Border Patrol had opened a gate on many weekends to allow up to ten people at a time to exchange words across the line.

The Supreme Court was scheduled to hear arguments the following month on whether the Trump administration had illegally diverted billions from the Defense Department to fund the wall after Congress refused the money Trump sought—a dispute that had triggered a thirty-five-day government shutdown in 2017. It remained unclear whether Biden would adopt Trump's legal position before the Court. The government's brief was due February 11.

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador welcomed Biden's decision to halt construction but defended Trump's record, noting that U.S. presidents dating back to the 1990s had built border barriers. He presented a chart to make the point. The wall, in other words, was not a Trump invention—but the pace and scale of his final push, and the billions left in suspended contracts, were distinctly his.