It is fitting that Trump & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade just spent a day down on the southern border with Kirstjen Nielsen, John Kelly's former aide de camp who's the very new Homeland Security boss. Asked in the piece that ran this morning as to what Trump told her when she took over, she said “Build the wall, protect our country.”

Well, remember the wall? It's lost the media's interest amid the avalanche of so many other Trump and other stories. But a great joint investigative report makes clear that it would be built on land yanked from citizens in the most cavalier and egregious government conduct.

A project out this morning by Texas Tribune and ProPublica—a sign of the media times as outlets realize they can't go it alone on certain big efforts—details the federal land grab of Texas property that spans several presidencies and forms the heart of the once privately-held territory to be used by Trump to build his wall. The reporting project was financially assisted by the nonprofit Pulitzer Center and here's a bottom line: long before Trump was elected the government was out of control as it totally abuses its power to take away land from citizens and, way back then, built an 18-foot-high fence in Brownsville, Texas.

Yes, the Department of Homeland Security “paid $18.2 million starting in 2007 to accumulate a ribbon of land occupying almost half the length of the 120 miles of the Rio Grande Valley in southernmost Texas. It first tried to play nice, then filed hundreds of eminent domain lawsuits to get what it wanted, namely thousands of acres on the borders of Texas, Arizona New Mexico and California.” This dissects more than 400 eminent domain lawsuits and leaves you shaking its head about actions that have played out in successive presidencies and that highlight was one law professor concedes “is pretty much a very dark corner of the law.”

The reporting partners now find that the department “circumvented laws designed to help landowners receive fair compensation,” not conducting formal appraisal of targeted parcels and hit owners with low-ball offers. Meanwhile, wealthier owners with lawyers “negotiated deals that, on average, tripled the opening bids from Homeland Security” while poor land owners essentially took what was offered.

Further, “The Justice Department bungled hundreds of condemnation cases. The agency took property without knowing the identity of the actual owners. It condemned land without researching facts as basic as property lines. Landholders spent tens of thousands of dollars to defend themselves from the government’s mistakes.”

The government was forced to redraft certain settlements with owners after shafting them by not accounting for valuable nearby water rights. And, get this, the department sometimes “paid people for property they did not actually own. The agency did not attempt to recover the misdirected taxpayer funds, instead paying for land a second time once it determined the correct owners.”

Michael Chertoff, the former prosecutor who was Homeland Security boss under President George W. Bush and personally approved the condemnations in Texas, declined to comment. for a story that begins in that era but continued. President Obama oversee construction of the fence, with 654 miles built at a cost of $2.4 billion by Homeland Security.

This is a fine job by ProPublica's T. Christian Miller and the Texas Tribune's Julián Aguilar and Kiah Collier. Read it and realize that the bulldozers and pile drivers are probably not too far away. Maybe Kirstjen Nielsen will take a look, if she doesn't know the full history of what she inherits, as she chides Congress (as she did to Kilmeade this morning) for not giving her the needed funding.