President Donald Trump hinted at a trip to the U.S. Mexico border south of San Diego to take a look at the prototypes that have been built for his proposed border wall.
Trump called on Congress to fund the wall during his comments Wednesday.
Although U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials have yet to receive funding to build a full-scale model of the wall, they are testing eight prototypes that were completed in October to determine what type of wall should be built in the various sections of the U.S.-Mexico border.
Four concrete wall prototypes are solid, preventing agents from seeing through them and into Mexico. Four others are made of thick metal poles. Some are topped by round tubes, which are less vulnerable to grappling hooks than sharp edges.
“We put up, as you know, six different varieties of walls,” the president said. “We want to be able to see through.”
“But we want vision; we want to be able to see through who is on the other side of the wall,” he said.
He described the prototypes build as “wonderful” and then added, “I may be going there, very shortly, to look at them in their final form.”
Local
Each prototype stands approximately 30-feet tall and 25-feet wide.
Trump has asked Congress for $1.6 billion for the first installment of his proposed border wall. It would replace 14 miles in San Diego and build 60 miles, or 96 kilometers, in Texas' Rio Grande Valley, the busiest corridor for illegal crossings.
