Photo: Alamy
President Donald Trump said Wednesday his administration will reclaim and use border wall materials sold off by the Biden administration, pledging to complete construction with those supplies.
Speaking to reporters at the Kennedy Center after announcing this year’s Kennedy Center Honors recipients, Trump confirmed reports that unused wall sections will be returned to the federal government. “We are taking that wall back,” he said.
In December, videos showed trucks hauling unused wall panels away from a section near Tucson, Arizona, a busy area for illegal crossings under the Biden administration.
“They sold the wall,” Trump said. “This is expensive stuff. Hardened steel, very expensive. 9,000-pound concrete and rebar. Rebar is very expensive. The hardest rebar. It’s very hard to cut.” He accused Biden of selling the materials “for pennies on the dollar, $0.03 on the dollar, $0.04 on the dollar.”
Trump said U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi has been working on legal action against the company that bought the materials and that a settlement is in place to return them.
“They stole the wall from us,” he said. “We’re going to take the wall back. We’ll put it up.”
The president described building hundreds of miles of wall to specifications requested by Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, with steel, concrete, rebar and wiring for security systems. He said plans for an additional 200 miles were halted after the 2020 election.
The auction site GovPlanet, which listed the wall materials, said in a statement that it has agreed to expedite their return.
“GovPlanet has reached an agreement, working with the Office of the Border Czar, to return border wall materials that were previously deemed surplus and sourced by the federal government to GovPlanet via existing contracts,” said the company, a subsidiary of an Illinois-founded, British Columbia-based international operation called Ritchie Brothers Auctioneers-RB Global, according to Fox News.
“A third-party firm that has been contracted for construction of the border wall will take receipt of the materials over the next 90 days,” GovPlanet added.