Folks, where do we even start with this next one? We’ve all seen more than enough shocking reports and allegations out of this administration over the past several years, but every now and then there’s just something so fucking ridiculous, it’s like it doesn’t fully sink in. It’s like The Onion. But it’s not. It’s real life. This is one of those times.
The New York Times reports two whistleblowers allege that contractors building impeached president Donald Trump’s racist border wall smuggled in armed Mexican guards to watch worksites building the racist border wall he’s using in his quest to keep Mexicans out, going so far as to create a dirt road to help expedite the unlawful crossings. “The ironies of the border,” reporter Dianne Solis tweeted. “Armed Mexicans smuggled in to guard wall.”
The Times reports the complaint by a former deputy sheriff in San Diego County and a former FBI special agent against federal contractor Sullivan Land Services Co. and subcontractor Ultimate Concrete of El Paso dates all the way back to February but is just now being released by a federal judge after the Department of Justice said it was staying out of the case. Wonder why.
The Times said it “could not independently verify the accusations,” but said that complaint accused the companies “of hiring workers who were not vetted by the United States government,” going “so far as to build a dirt road to expedite illegal border crossings to sites in San Diego, using construction vehicles to block security cameras.”
And all of it was apparently green-lit by “[a]n unnamed supervisor at the Army Corps of Engineers approved the operation,” the report continued. “Mr. Trump may have failed to make good on his 2016 promise to make Mexico pay for the wall, but if the accusations prove true, the administration apparently did rely on Mexican workers for the project, potentially at the expense of Americans,” the report said.
The Times further reported that new data continued to show “that a border wall that Mr. Trump once advertised as ‘impenetrable’ has continued to prove very penetrable,” getting breached more than 320 times in four major areas of the border from October 2019 to March of this year. But of course, we already knew the wall was fucking useless, with smugglers cutting through Trump’s “virtually impenetrable” fencing with $100 saws available at your local Home Depot.
What began as a racist campaign chant has turned into a humanitarian and environmental disaster that President-elect Joe Biden has vowed to end construction on immediately as president. There’s been poo-pooing that it may be challenging for him to stop construction dead in its tracks, but it’s really not. John Horan, a professor on government procurement law at Georgetown University Law Center, "said all government contracts come with two standard clauses that allow the government to terminate or change the contract for any reason,” Arizona Republic reported last month.
”Generally the clause need not even be included; termination for convenience is implied in federal contracts,” Texas Observer journalist Gus Bova tweeted. And not only must wall contracts be immediately terminated, but the wall itself, which was illegitimately constructed, must also come down.
Oh, and we didn’t even get to all of the whistleblower allegations in the Times, either. “The employees also accused the companies of submitting fraudulent invoices for border wall costs and ‘hiding’ the full profits of the project,” the report said. But it should come as no surprise that a project funded through outright, shameless theft of government funds is only resulting in even more shameless theft.