Show caption A worker passes a partially demolished border wall prototype during demolition at the border between Tijuana, Mexico, and San Diego on 27 February 2019. Photograph: Gregory Bull/AP Donald Trump The walls fall: prototypes for Trump’s southern border barrier come down Demolition comes the same week that the House voted to block Trump’s national emergency declaration Hazar Kilani in New York Thu 28 Feb 2019 21.28 GMT Share on Facebook

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And the prototypes came tumbling down.

“I will build a great wall and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me – and I’ll build them very inexpensively. I will build a great, great wall on our southern border, and I will make Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words.”

We marked his words. But the wall has not been built and this week the government is demolishing eight prototype sections of new wall that have been languishing in the border desert of southern California for months.

They have been used most dramatically as a backdrop for a presidential visit last March and for protest art.

The administration has said that “elements” of the prototypes have been “melded” into current border barrier designs and the prototypes have “served their purpose”, whatever that means.

“I will make Mexico pay for that wall,” Trump had said, repeatedly. A record government shutdown, a declaration of a national emergency and humble crowdfunding efforts by Republicans later, not a mile of Trump’s desired new wall has been built. Some sections along the 1,900-plus mile US-Mexico border have been refurbished or enhanced.

And as comic actor Maya Rudolph confirmed in her opening moments on stage with Tina Fey and Amy Poehler introducing the 2019 Oscars ceremony on Sunday, the president’s dream wall is clearly not going to be funded by Mexico.

The sight of prototypes turning to dust made that all the clearer this week, the structures coming down in the same week that the House of Representatives voted to block Trump’s national emergency declaration to procure extra funding for what he now terms the barrier, or “whatever they’d like to call it”.

The Department of Homeland Security redirected $20m from its budget in February 2017, a month after Trump took office, to pay for the eight prototypes erected south of San Diego, a few yards from the border with Tijuana, Mexico, and smaller mock-ups further away that have already been dismantled.

The prototypes each varied by angle of slope, thickness and curves. The commercial bidding guidelines had called for them to withstand punishment by sledgehammer, pickaxe, torch, chisel or battery-operated tools, and to prevent use of climbing aids such as grappling hooks.

Except, a government report obtained by KPBS revealed otherwise. “The heavily-redacted government documents reveal every mock-up was deemed vulnerable to at least one breaching technique,” reported KPBS.

And according to a report by the Government Accountability Office, the eight model sections were riddled with design and construction flaws. US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) tested the slabs and found they could be breached.

In Tijuana, activist artists led by the Backbone Campaign, projected images and slogans on to the prototypes. Photograph: Jill Marie Holslin/Courtesy OLBSD

On Wednesday, slabs from seven out of the eight prototypes fell in clouds of dust in under two hours, no match for a jackhammer. At the point of destruction, an owl fled from a steel tube atop one section.

Public access to the prototypes had been blocked from the San Diego side.

But in Tijuana, activist artists led by the Backbone Campaign, projected images and slogans on to the prototypes, with messages such as “Refugees Welcome Here” and the Statue of Liberty.

“Trump’s wall is a false solution to a nonexistent problem. It squanders resources to satisfy irrational fears, xenophobia and racism of his political base,” Bill Moyer, the executive director of the Backbone Campaign, told the Guardian on Thursday.