President Donald Trump is making it unmistakably clear: the wall is coming back — and he intends to rebuild it using the very materials the former Biden administration sold off for scrap.
At a press event at the Kennedy Center, following his announcement of the Kennedy Center Honors recipients, Trump fielded a direct question from The Daily Wire about the controversial sell-off of unused border wall components. His answer was as emphatic as it was revealing: “We are taking that wall back.”
It’s not just a symbolic vow. Trump pointed directly to the physical, hardened materials — 9,000-pound concrete and rebar sections — that were once stockpiled for border construction, only to be auctioned off by the former Biden administration for “pennies on the dollar.” According to Trump, some of the material fetched as little as three or four cents per dollar, despite being engineered for maximum durability, equipped with internal wiring for surveillance, and built to precise specifications requested by Border Patrol and ICE.
.@MaryMargOlohan: Biden was auctioning off border wall materials, now they’re selling them back… Are you finishing the wall? @POTUS: Biden sold it for scrap… That’s when I first realized they really wanted open borders… We’re gonna take the wall back and put it up. pic.twitter.com/yfV26qvVhV
— Daily Wire (@realDailyWire) August 13, 2025
What happened to those materials? Videos obtained by The Daily Wire in December showed the wall sections being hauled away from the Arizona border, an area heavily affected by illegal crossings during Biden’s presidency. For Trump, this wasn’t just bureaucratic waste — it was an unmistakable signal that the administration had abandoned any pretense of serious border enforcement.
“They sold the wall,” Trump said. “They stole the wall from us.” He emphasized the costly engineering behind it: reinforced steel, integrated communications infrastructure, concrete reinforced with rebar — “the hardest rebar,” as he put it. And yet, the former Biden administration not only halted construction, they offloaded the materials at fire-sale prices.
According to Trump, the tide is turning. Legal action, spearheaded in part by attorney Pam Bondi, appears to have resulted in a settlement. Trump announced that the materials are now in the process of being reclaimed, with a “small amount of money” paid to end litigation and expedite the return of supplies that should have never left federal hands in the first place.
“We’ll put it up,” Trump promised. “We built hundreds of miles. And I was getting very close.” He added that a post-election plan to construct an additional 200 miles was already greenlit — until, as he put it, “we had the bad election result.”
This episode underscores a broader and more contentious point: Trump argues that Biden’s approach to the border has been one of deliberate neglect. He cited staggering numbers, including over 11,000 murderers who crossed into the U.S. illegally, many of them repeat offenders. And while the exact figure is likely to draw scrutiny, it speaks to Trump’s framing of a stark national security contrast between his administration and Biden’s.
Interestingly, even GovPlanet, the government’s own surplus auction platform, has confirmed that a deal has been struck to return the wall materials. The company said it’s working with the Office of the Border Czar to “expedite the transfer of these materials to support the administration’s border protection plans.”
