Three men at the border showed this week just how quickly President Donald Trump’s unscalable border wall can be climbed. A Customs and Border Patrol official announced later that the man who climbed over the wall to cross the border was quickly arrested, so the “system” worked.
A video of the feat has gone viral on Twitter a month after border officials conceded that people were also cutting through the barrier with a cordless power tool available at hardware stores.
Trump has declared the barrier both “impenetrable” and “unclimbable.” He claimed that 20 unnamed “world-class mountain climbers” were brought in to test the wall with no success. “This wall can’t be climbed,” Trump declared.
Several climbers scrambled over a mock-up of the wall during a climbing meet in Kentucky in October. Check out the video above.
And it can clearly be scaled on the actual border barrier as well, as shown in a video in Mexicali, just south of Calexico, California, posted by Deseret Sun photojournalist J. Omar Ornelas. The climber in the video uses a simple rope ladder to get up the wall and then slides down the other side. A second man slides back down on the Mexican side after a vehicle stops in front of them.
CPB responded with a posted video after the tweet saying the wall “system” worked “exactly as designed” because detection technology picked up the breach and the person who crossed the border was quickly arrested. But sensors wouldn’t help in areas hours from agents, which includes many sections of the wall. The breached portion of the wall in the video is next to a busy roadway easily accessible to law enforcement.
“I’m standing in the exact location where this incident took place, and I will provide you with the information that that video clip could not,” Assistant Chief Patrol Agent Joshua Devack said in video posted Wednesday. “The border wall system consists not only of physical barrier but also lighting, patrol roads and detection technology.”
The “wall system worked exactly as designed,” he explained, “and the subject was apprehended.”