On Wednesday, Donald (Wall) Trump posted this video in a tweet showing a time lapse of southern wall being put in place:
Today he retweeted it with the added ALL CAPS exhortation.
But there's a big problem: The footage, which was filmed more than five months ago on Sep. 18, 2018, isn't really new wall construction at all, and certainly not part of the ongoing construction of "the wall" that Trump has been haggling with Congress over.
"It's a replacement project," Mike Petersen, public affairs director for the Army Corps of Engineers' South Pacific Division, told Task & Purpose. "I was in the division 12 years ago and we were doing border wall replacement work back then."
The footage shows work on the Santa Theresa Project Border Wall Replacement Project, a push to upgrade a 20-mile stretch of pre-existing vehicle barriers to bollard-style fence, Peterson told Task & Purpose.
While the work was done under the directive of an Executive Order Trump signed shortly after taking office, it is not contemporary construction of new wall.
Trump did get some details right: Construction began April 9, 2018, and ended on January 30, well ahead of the estimated 390 days Customs and Border Patrol anticipated when construction first began last year.
taskandpurpose.com/...