President Donald Trump’s border wall could cost $20 billion, and his directive to crack down on border security could increase federal government spending by $13 billion a year.

It’s not clear where he’s going to get the money.


Trump said Wednesday, without elaborating, that his plan would “save billions and billions of dollars.” But it’s likely he’ll need Congress to agree to a massive spending increase if he wants to fully implement his vision.

The president has some authority to move dollars around within existing budgets. But his plan could cost more than the entire 2016 combined budgets for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, which ran to $19.4 billion.

John Sandweg, who was acting director of ICE in 2013 and 2014, told POLITICO that the cost and logistics of parts of Trump’s executive orders are infeasible.

“I just view this as a political document more than anything,” Sandweg said of the orders.

A back-of-the-envelope calculation based on government figures shows how the costs could quickly add up.

A single-layer fence on the border — not even a solid wall — could run to $6.5 million per mile, according to a yet-to-be-released report by the Government Accountability Office.

The Department of Homeland Security already has roughly 700 miles of fence and vehicle barriers. Covering the rest of the border expanse could cost $8.1 billion. (It’s unclear whether Trump would replace and repair existing barriers, too.) Double-layer fence would run closer to $20 billion.

His plan to stop releasing undocumented immigrants while they await deportation hearings would spark enormous growth in the nation’s already overburdened immigration detention system, too.

DHS requested $2.2 billion in its fiscal year 2017 budget, a tally that would fund 31,000 detention beds per day. Sandweg estimates Trump would need four to five times as many beds to enforce his call for mandatory detention — an increase that could raise yearly costs to $10 billion.

The costs of Trump’s executive orders will also include billions in salaries and benefits for new agents. Trump ordered the hiring of 10,000 more federal immigration agents and 5,000 Border Patrol agents, an expense that would require additional funding from Congress.

If Trump adds 10,000 additional ICE agents, it could mean a further $3.9 billion each year. DHS requested $3.1 billion in fiscal year 2017 for enforcement and removal costs, which include compensation for roughly 8,000 agents.

The addition of 5,000 Border Patrol agents would tack $900 million annually onto the bill, based on the $3.8 billion DHS requested for 21,070 agents in fiscal-year 2017.

Trump could move around money in the existing budget and “hire a very limited number of people,” said Kerri Talbot, a former aide to Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) and a partner at the Veng Group, a public relations firm.

Finding the right people for the job could also be difficult, Talbot said. Agents need to pass a background and security check, and need to be willing to live in what are often remote areas.

Even if funds existed for more Border Patrol agents, Talbot thinks it’s unnecessary.

“They’re already over 20,000,” she said. “They could practically link hands across America if you line them all up.”

Trump wouldn’t be the first president to struggle with ambitious border projects.

President George W. Bush signed the Secure Fence Act into law in 2006 (the same legislation that gave Trump the power to pick up construction now).

Bush was able to build 650 miles of single-layer fence and vehicle barriers, but $1.2 billion devoted to double-layer fence resulted in only a few dozen miles.

Overall, the project faced a host of problems, from reluctant landowners to environmental restrictions. The Rio Grande River in Texas and sand dunes in Arizona present engineering challenges that could slow down the project.

The graveyard of failed border-security plans includes SBInet, a multi-billion contract with Boeing to install an electronic surveillance system across the border. DHS pulled the plug on that in 2011.

It’s also unclear whether there’s public support for the kind of spending that will be needed to complete the wall. A poll by the Pew Research Center in late 2016 found 59 percent of Americans don’t think construction of the wall is important.

Some immigration experts think it’s a pointless endeavor anyway. Apprehensions of immigrants crossing the border illegally are far lower than decades past and immigration from Mexico stands at net zero.

“We no longer have the paramount problem of crossing the border,” said Muzaffar Chishti, a director at the left-leaning Migration Policy Institute. He called the wall “a 20th-century response to a 21st-century problem.”