The Mexico-U.S. border fence to San Diego County from Tijuana, Mexico is seen. | Guillermo Arias/AFP/Getty Images Employment & Immigration GoFundMe campaign for border wall aims for a billion (at least)

President Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened to shut down the government over funding for his border wall. But as the question of money for his campaign proposal once again roils Congress, one man thinks he may have found a solution: crowd-funding.

Brian Kolfage, a 37-year-old Florida resident who was severely wounded in the Iraq war, has started a GoFundMe campaign to complete Trump's signature pledge. The campaign has raised more than $7 million in the three days since it started, with an overall goal of $1 billion.


The haul so far makes Kolfage’s effort one of the largest GoFundMe campaigns of the year, currently fourth on the site. The Florida veteran’s fundraising page ranks ahead of the nearly $4 million raised for the March for Our Lives in Washington, the anti-gun violence rally organized by students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, but trails the largest campaign for the year, the Time's Up legal defense fund, which has raised more than $22 million.

Trump initially told congressional leaders that he would accept nothing less than $5 billion for his wall in a bill to keep most of the federal government open. Estimates for the total costs of a wall have varied — even Trump has changed his mind on an original vision for a continuous stretch along the entire border — but it usually falls somewhere in the $12 billion to $20 billion range. A staff report written for Senate Democrats argued that the price could be as high as $70 billion.

In a statement on the campaign’s site, Kolfage said the $1 billion is the current max for GoFundMe, but he is working to increase it. He added that if the roughly 63 million Americans who voted for Trump were each to donate $80, they would be able to raise the $5 billion the president is asking Congress for.

“Democrats are going to stall this project by every means possible and play political games to ensure President Trump doesn’t get his victor [sic],” Kolfage wrote. “They’d rather see President Trump fail, than see America succeed. However, if we can fund a large portion of this wall, it will jump-start things and will be less money Trump has to secure from our politicians.”

A representative from GoFundMe did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Kolfage says that he is in touch with the Trump administration to secure a point of contact for the potential donations and a legal firm to make sure Uncle Sam cannot use the money for other means. There’s also a pledge that all the donations will be held until the legal aspects are worked out — and that they will be refunded if the campaign does not come close to its goal.

Americans crowd-funding their own government is not as unusual as it might seem.

The Treasury Department has a way for citizens to make unconditional gifts to the government. Among other things, one can donate to help pay down the national debt — in fiscal year 2018, just shy of $776,000 was raised this way. The National Park Service has its foundation for donations; businessman and philanthropist David M. Rubenstein has donated more than $18 million to improvements for national monuments like the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument.

Perhaps the most notable crowd-funding campaign in U.S. history was the one that raised the money to erect a pedestal for the Statue of Liberty. “Let us not wait for the millionaires to give us this money,” implored Joseph Pulitzer in March 1885 in the New York World, his newspaper. More than $100,000 was raised, much of it from donations of less than a dollar.