US to paint southern border wall black to make it hotter and harder to climb

With illegal crossings at the U.S. southern border at their lowest level in decades, the Trump administration wants to take another step to deter the arrival of new immigrants. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced Tuesday that the entire U.S.-Mexico border wall will be painted black to “make it even harder for people to climb it.” The idea is for the metal structure to absorb more heat, to the point where it becomes too hot to touch.

“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,” Noem said during a visit to a section of the wall in Santa Teresa, New Mexico. “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 added. She even brought a roller to help with the painting.

U.S. Border Patrol Director Mike Banks, who attended the event with Noem, noted that the black paint would also help prevent rust.

Painting the border wall is an idea Trump considered during his first term, when he made the territorial barrier a central axis of his immigration policy and pushed for the construction of hundreds of miles of it at all costs. At that time, he also wanted the structure to be black, a design change that was estimated to cost $500 million in 2020, according to government contracts obtained by The Washington Post.

This time, Trump will receive more than $46 billion to complete the wall as part of the new funding approved by Congress in July as part of the president’s tax overhaul. “We had an incredible amount of resources allocated to us in the big beautiful bill, because that’s going to allow us to continue construction,” Noem said Tuesday, adding that the government is building approximately half a mile per day. The secretary did not specify how much it would cost to paint the structure.

The administration’s renewed push to expand and paint the southern border wall, which currently stands at about 745 miles in length, comes as illegal border crossings have declined dramatically as a result of the president’s immigration crackdown, which includes accelerated, mass deportations and thousands of arrests per day.

In July, irregular crossings at all U.S. borders plummeted to the lowest level ever recorded, according to the latest data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection. The southwest border recorded 4,601 apprehensions, a 24% drop from the previous record in June and a 92% decrease from July 2024, during Joe Biden’s term, when border arrests reached more than 6,000 per day.

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