Border wall prototypes designed to keep people from illegally entering the U.S. from Mexico were breached more than a dozen times by tactical teams carrying out various scenarios to test the barriers, according to a report released on Tuesday by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Experts performed a series of real-life events to see whether they could breach, scale or penetrate prototypes for the wall between Mexico and the U.S. proposed by President Donald Trump, Newsweek reported, and were successful many times.
In one instance, testers were able to collapse the prototype wall, leading the CPD to recommend that significant improvements be made on the wall before construction begins.
“The eight border wall prototypes were not and cannot be designed to be indestructible,” however, the barrier would enable Border Patrol to “impede or deny efforts to scale, breach, or dig under such a barrier, giving agents time to respond,” the CBP said in a statement, according to San Diego’s NBC 7.
CBP union representative Joshua Wilson defended the $20 million Otay Mesa border wall designs, noting that it would require specialized equipment to penetrate the wall.
“The wall is never going to be a be-all end-all, but what it is able to do is to slow down illegal traffic crossing the border and give the border patrol not only a safer environment to work in, but it also allows us time to identify and interdict that traffic and deploy appropriate resources to deal with it,” he said.
“It's troubling because this wall is a wasteful wall, a harmful wall and an irresponsible wall,” said Andrea Guerrero of Alliance San Diego, according to NBC News.
Earlier this year, tactical teams reportedly carried out a separate series of tests on prototypes of the proposed wall and were unable to breach or climb them, Business Insider said.
Those tests reportedly revealed that different sections of the border would require different types of wall.
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