SANTA TERESA, New Mexico - President Donald Trump got his wall. Sort of.

A 20-mile segment of old vehicle barriers will be replaced with a bollard-style fence. Except that Chief Patrol Agent Aaron A. Hull of the U.S. Border Patrol El Paso Sector on Monday officially rebranded that kind of fence as a wall.

"The president has started his project," said Hull, announcing a groundbreaking construction project here in New Mexico, just miles from the Texas border. "It's very much a wall."

The construction will replace three-foot-tall posts and a taller mesh fence with an 18- to 30-foot barrier that agents will now call a "wall." The steel structure, known as bollard fencing, is a style favored by agents who want to be able to look into Mexico as they patrol the nation's southern border.

The project is part of a replacement barrier that's been undergoing upgrades throughout the Bush, Obama and now Trump administrations. The project is estimated to cost $73.3 million. And Mexico isn't paying for it. This stretch will be financed with 2017 Customs and Border Protections funding.

Hull said they looked at different prototypes ordered by Trump in San Diego and decided to stick with bollard fencing, which is not remarkably different than a towering barrier that already exists down the road in Sunland Park, N.M.

Recently, Trump inspected eight prototypes for a future 30-foot border wall, an outing that seemed more of a photo-op for his conservative red base.

"We took a look at a prototype from San Diego," he said. "But the wall that we're using in Anapra is the same wall that's going to be here. It works for us and it's the same wall we're going to put out here for the next 20 miles," referring to the Mexican town across Sunland Park, New Mexico.

This bollard fence in Sunland Park, New Mexico, went up a year ago as part of President Obama's construction project to replace old fencing. The same style will be extended miles away, but it will now be called a wall. (Alfredo Corchado / The Dallas Morning News)

The change in semantics, analysts said, is part of the definition that's bedeviled the Trump presidency from the beginning and designed as cover for problems with Trump's signature campaign promise to his base, that of building a big, beautiful wall. Trump had asked for as much as $25 billion to replace the existing border wall. Unable to get Congress to fully fund his border wall, and, under pressure from conservatives, the president has lately been painting a dire need for increased border security, suggesting the border is a no-man's land under assault by undocumented immigrants and drug traffickers.

The Trump administration has also shifted goalposts, saying any new updates, maintenance work, or replacements of existing barriers qualify as part of "Trump's wall."

"To us, it's all new wall," Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said last week. "If there was a wall before that needs to be replaced, it's being replaced by a new wall. This is the Trump border wall."

Nielsen and U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions are scheduled to visit the New Mexico border this week to draw attention to border security.

Critics, including the ACLU and array of immigrant advocates, accuse Trump of manufacturing a crisis, and impulsively deploying the military out of frustration. Last week, he announced that up to 4,000 national guardsmen will be send to the border - 250 of them already in the Texas Rio Grande.

Eric Olson, a security expert and deputy director of the Latin American Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center, said he would not "characterize the situation at the border as a crisis."

"By DHS's own analysis it is increasingly hard for migrants to enter the U.S. without documents with DHS claiming between 60 and 80 percent effectiveness in stopping irregular entries," he said. "Trump Administration is coming to terms with the fact that there are many financial, technical, and political obstacles to the promised wall. They are trying to keep faith with their political base by rebranding this as the promised wall."

It's also worth noting that presidents Bush and Obama also temporarily sent troops to the border.

Howard Campbell, a border anthropologist at the University of Texas at El Paso, said "attempts to build walls between the U.S. and Mexico are an economic mistake that harms border residents as well as larger binational business and political interests. In that sense the border is a political football or in Mexican terms a political piñata, to be tossed and whacked for partisan purposes."

At the news conference, Hull said the wall is just what the Border Patrol needs.

"The wall will allow us to make more effective use of agents and technology," he said. "It's also important to note the safety aspects that a wall provides... Serious infrastructure creates a safer environment for our people to operate and creates a safer community on both sides of our border."

We are sealing up our Southern Border. The people of our great country want Safety and Security. The Dems have been a disaster on this very important issue! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 7, 2018

Across the bollard fence, Lourdes Campos Nuñez, 32, and her daughter, Michelle, son Miguel, lingered closed to their home in Anapra. Interviewed across the barrier, they were told the fence would now be known as a wall.

"I thought the wall would be made out of cement," said Lourdes. "That man, your president, is crazy, but if insists on wall, let's all call it a wall and maybe he'll leave us alone."

"Whatever you call it," said Miguel. "It's ugly and divides us."

Michelle quietly added, "At least with this fence, you can still see each other across. This is better than a concrete wall."