President Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem want the U.S.’s southern border wall painted black to keep people from climbing over it.
Noem made the announcement Tuesday as she visited a segment of the wall in New Mexico, even wielding a roller herself. The wall is already high and deep, she said at a press conference while standing in front of it, and soon it will be too hot to handle.
“That is specifically at the request of the president, who understands that in the hot temperatures down here when something is painted black, it gets even warmer, and it will make it even harder for people to climb,” Noem said. “So we are going to be painting the entire southern border wall black to make sure that we encourage individuals to not come into our country illegally.”
The paint itself would stave off rust as well as people, said U.S. Border Patrol Chief Mike Banks, who was on hand with Noem.
While deportation has been the cornerstone of President Trump’s run to boot people he thinks should not be here, he also seeks to prevent them from coming in the first place. The number of people crossing the land border illegally had plummeted by nearly 40% earlier this year.
It is not the first time Trump has attempted the color reboot. He also tried to get the wall painted black during his first term, which stood to increase the construction cost by $500 million, The Washington Post reported in 2020. The parts that did get painted were soon peeling.
Noem didn’t address how much of the $46.5 billion earmarked for the wall in the so-called Big Beautiful Bill Act would go toward the paint job.
The wall doesn’t lend itself to such treatment along the entire 2,000-mile-long border with Mexico, since much of that runs along the Rio Grande, but Noem addressed that too.
“The border wall will look very different based on the topography and the geography of where it is built,” she said during her press conference Tuesday, adding that a half-mile of it is being constructed every day.
Reddit users lampooned the plan, pointing out, among other things, the existence of nighttime and winter, when the wall might even become cold. For instance, temperatures in the border town of Columbus, N.M., fluctuate from an upper-60s high to a low in the upper 20s, and similar numbers apply to Antelope Wells.
Noem began her trip assessing water damage in Ruidoso, where flash floods killed three people last month. Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham said through a spokesperson that she welcomed the secretary’s attention there.
Grisham also favored extra federal help in combatting the drug trade and “other nefarious criminal activity in the border region” but drew the line at “Trump’s mass deportation efforts that would break up families and harm New Mexico’s economy and communities,” spokesman Michael Coleman told the Daily News.
Passing comprehensive immigration reform legislation, Coleman said, would be more effective than “painting a border wall black to injure people who are seeking a better life.”
With News Wire Services
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