Unvetted Mexican nationals have been smuggled into the U.S. and hired by federal contractors to guard Trump’s border wall, designed to keep them out. The corruption is even worse than that, according to two whistleblowers.
December 9, 2020

Unvetted Mexican nationals have been smuggled into the U.S. and hired by federal contractors to guard Trump’s border wall, designed to keep them out. The corruption is even worse than that, according to two whistleblowers.

The irony is gobsmacking. From The New York Times:

Two whistle-blowers have accused contractors building President Trump’s border wall of smuggling armed Mexican security teams into the United States to guard construction sites, even building an illegal dirt road to speed the operation, according to court documents unsealed by a federal judge on Friday.

The two employees, who were both contracted to provide security at the sites, accused the company, Sullivan Land Services Co., or S.L.S. — as well as a subcontractor, Ultimate Concrete of El Paso — of hiring workers who were not vetted by the United States government, overcharging for construction costs and making false statements about those actions.

The allegations came to light as data obtained by The New York Times showed that a border wall that Mr. Trump once advertised as “impenetrable” has continued to prove very penetrable. In fact, it has been repeatedly breached by migrants, requiring repairs that the whistle-blowers say were completed by workers who were not authorized by the government to be on the job.

As MSNBC’s Julia Ainsley noted, Sullivan Land Services is not “some small company that might have made a mistake.” It got $1.4 billion in federal contracts. Presumably, it could have afforded to hire Americans for the work.

There’s probably more corruption we don’t know about, too. Ainsley pointed out that when such a big construction project is rammed through “a lot of the bid processing that's usually competitive and oversight that's usually going into something like this is diminished.”

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