President Donald Trump vowed Wednesday to finish the border wall using materials that former President Joe Biden sold “for pennies on the dollar,” as first reported by The Daily Wire in December.
Speaking to reporters at the Kennedy Center after announcing this year’s Kennedy Center Honors recipients, Trump was asked by The Daily Wire about reports that portions of the wall would be returned to the federal government. “We are taking that wall back,” he pledged.
The president criticized the Biden administration for selling off border wall materials, noting that videos obtained exclusively by The Daily Wire from a U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent in December showed trucks removing unused wall sections from an area just south of Tucson, Arizona — a hotspot for illegal crossings under Biden.
“They sold the wall,” the president 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. You have different materials. It’s very hard to cut. They cut it down if they can. It’s very hard to cut.”
Trump added: “Biden sold it for pennies on the dollar, $0.03 on the dollar, $0.04 on the dollar, he sold it.”
“Well, Pam Bondi has been working very hard on suing that company and I think they’ve reached a settlement where we’re taking the wall back,” Trump added, before glancing back at the attorney general who accompanied him to the podium.
“But they stole the wall from us. That wall was so expensive to build. And we had it, as you know, hundreds of miles of it. They came along and they basically sold it for scrap. What a shame that is,” he said.
“But that was when I first realized that these people actually want to have open borders,” he added of the Biden administration. “No country — poor countries don’t have open borders. We had open borders where people just walked in, didn’t matter what they look like, who they were, they could have — we had 11,888 murderers. Half of whom killed more than one person. Literally. Killed more than one person. And this is who we took into our country. So the wall is the least of it.”
“We are going to take the wall back,” he said again. “We are paying a small amount of money, as I understand it, to get it back, to get rid of the litigation. We’ll take it back. We’ll put it up.”
