Trump orders southern border wall painted black to scorch climbers

Having completed adorning the walls of the Oval Office in gold, President Donald Trump is moving to another redecorating project: his signature wall on the southern border. The president has ordered Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to paint the 1,300-mile border wall black — not because he likes the color, but because, he insists, as he did during his first term, that it will make the metal bars too hot for undocumented immigrants to climb.

Five years ago, the cost of the project was put at $500 million to $2 billion. Today’s prices would likely make it more expensive, but based on past results and expert opinion, the outcome will likely be the same: it won’t work.

In May 2020, as the COVID pandemic ramped up and states were coming out of lockdown, President Trump ordered his “beautiful” border wall to be painted black.

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“The president’s determination to have the steel bollards coated in black has fluctuated during the past several years, and military commanders and border officials believed as recently as last fall that they had finally talked him out of it,” The Washington Post reported in early May 2020. “They consider the black paint unnecessary, costly and a significant long-term maintenance burden, and they left it out of the original U.S. Customs and Border Protection design specifications.”

The president was unrelenting.

“Trump has not let go of the idea, insisting that the dark color will enhance its forbidding appearance and leave the steel too hot to touch during summer months. During a border wall meeting at the White House last month amid the coronavirus pandemic, the president told senior adviser Jared Kushner and aides to move forward with the paint job and to seek out cost estimates, according to four administration officials with knowledge of the meeting.”

The Post reported that estimates ranged from $500 million for two coats of a black acrylic paint to $2 billion for a “premium” powder coating.

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None of which, experts said, would do the job.

The black paint — $500 million or $2 billion — “won’t make much of a difference,” materials engineer Rick Duncan told the Post. “There’s no technical reason to paint it to make it hotter.”

Fast forward to this week.

Noem told reporters in New Mexico that the wall will be painted black, by order of the President.

“She went on to explain,” The Daily Beast reported on Wednesday, “that the change was being made ‘specifically at the request of the president,’ because ‘when something is painted black, it gets even warmer, making it even harder for people to climb.'”

Some areas that were painted before apparently did not stand the test of time.

Less than two years after the May 2020 decision to paint Trump’s wall black, The Washington Post reported that in March 2022 it had “observed several locations west of Sasabe, Ariz., where the wall’s black paint is already peeling off, less than 18 months after it was applied.”

Noem on Tuesday told reporters, “a nation without borders is no nation at all, and we’re so thankful that we have a president that understands that it understands that a secure border is important to our country’s future.”

“Now, if you look at the structure that’s behind me, it’s tall, which makes it very, very difficult to climb, almost impossible. It also goes deep into the ground, which would make it very difficult, if not impossible, to dig under, and today, we are also going to be painting it black,” she continued.

“That is specifically at the request of the president who understands that in the hot temperatures down here, when in something is painted black, it gets even warmer, and it will make it even harder for people to climb.”

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