Smugglers are sawing through new sections of Trump’s border wall

“Frankly, an all-concrete wall would have been a much less expensive wall to build,” Trump said in September during a visit to new sections of the barrier in San Diego. “But from the standpoint of Border Patrol, they were very much opposed to it.”

As he left the White House for Andrews Air Force Base en route to New York, Trump was asked if he was concerned about smugglers cutting through the new wall.

“I haven’t heard that,” Trump said. “We have a very powerful wall. But no matter how powerful, you can cut through anything, in all fairness. But we have a lot of people watching. You know cutting, cutting is one thing, but it’s easily fixed. One of the reasons we did it the way we did it, it’s very easily fixed. You put the chunk back in.”

CBP officials also have consistently said that no single structure, regardless of its design, can seal the border on its own. Rather, they have advocated for a “border wall system” that combines physical barriers, surveillance technology and the rapid deployment of agents to stop border crossers and attempted breaches.

“There’s no one silver bullet, and we’ve done our best to try to explain that,” said Chris Harris, a retired Border Patrol agent in San Diego. “You’re always going to have to have boots on the ground. That’s why there are armed police officers at Fort Knox.”

Smugglers with reciprocating saws were able to cut through previous versions of the barrier in far less time, agents note, and the new bollard design makes the smugglers’ task significantly more difficult. Other Homeland Security officials note that the narrow gap created by a cut bollard permits only one person to pass through at a time, making it more difficult for large groups of migrants or smugglers to cross.

Because CBP is adding double-layer barriers in high-traffic areas such as San Diego, smugglers seek out locations where the distance between the primary and secondary fences is narrowest. A sawing crew will cut at a bollard while lookouts watch for U.S. agents, so the smuggling team can run back into Mexico if authorities arrive. Once the agents leave, the smugglers can resume their sawing in the same place.

“What happens any time some barrier is thrown up in front of a business is they adapt, and that’s all they’re trying to do,” said Joshua Wilson, a Border Patrol agent and union official in San Diego.

The San Diego area is one of the most lucrative for narcotics smugglers or those bringing in migrants, who are willing to pay thousands of dollars apiece to reach the United States. Mexican deportees with homes and jobs on the U.S. side of the border are among some of the best-paying customers because they often have assets and are desperate to return.

The Trump administration commissioned some border barrier prototypes in 2017, and among the tests CBP conducted were the structures’ resilience against breaching with reciprocating saws, according to federal contracting documents and testing reports. At the time, CBP agents said that no single design could be completely impenetrable, but the agency determined that steel bollards could not be cut easily without the use of “multiple power tools.”

San Diego broadcaster KPBS, which reported on the prototype tests in 2018, obtained heavily redacted copies of the test results through FOIA requests. The reports showed that all of the designs the Trump administration evaluated in 2017 were found to be vulnerable to breaching methods.

NBC News subsequently published images of steel bollards that were cut during the prototype tests and showed the photographs to the president. “That’s a wall designed by previous administrations,” Trump said.

The version of the barrier being installed is based on the same bollard design, which the president calls “steel slats.” It features six-inch-thick square bollards with a steel exterior that is three-sixteenths of an inch and a core filled with commercial-grade 5,000-pound concrete that is strengthened with rebar.

Kevin Trumble, a professor of materials engineering at Purdue University, and Srinivasan Chandrasekar, a professor of industrial engineering at Purdue, said a skilled operator with a reciprocating saw would be able to cut through the structure and that a severed bollard could be pushed out of the way using a standard car jack.

The engineers said other lithium battery tools could also be used to cut the steel and concrete. “You could use another device, like an abrasive saw, that would go even faster, but they create sparks because they operate at a high speed,” Chandrasekar said.

The engineers estimated that it would take someone 20 minutes or less to cut through a bollard if a team worked in pairs with two saws. The crews might go through multiple blades to complete a cut, the engineers said, but the blades can be changed quickly to resume sawing.

Online video demonstrations of reciprocating saws show that commercially available diamond grit and tungsten carbide blades are capable of slicing through thick pieces of steel and concrete in significantly less time. One toothy, hardened blade that is particularly adept at cutting metal — the Diablo Steel Demon — can be seen zipping through a trailer hitch in less than 20 seconds.

Diablo brand promotional videos show carbide “extreme metal cutting” blades easily sawing through rebar, angle iron, steel pipes and steel plate that is three-eighths of an inch. The blades sell for between $10 and $15 at hardware stores and online. Diamond grit blades, which retail for slightly more, are used widely for cutting through steel, concrete and other materials.

The Trump administration has so far completed 76 miles of new barriers, all of it in areas like San Diego where the structure has replaced older, shorter and, in some cases, dilapidated fencing.

An additional 158 miles of barrier are under construction, according to CBP, and the agency said 276 miles are in a “preconstruction” phase.

The administration is on track to complete 450 miles of barriers by the end of next year, CBP acting commissioner Mark Morgan said last week. The latest construction data obtained by The Post show that the administration has finished just 2 percent of the barrier planned for stretches of border in Texas, where plans call for 166 miles of new fencing. Almost all of that barrier would be built on private land that the government has yet to acquire.

Trump campaigned on a promise to make Mexico pay for construction of the barrier, but nearly $10 billion that his administration has budgeted for the project has been taxpayer money from U.S. funding sources, primarily the Defense Department.

MSN