Trump border wall inches closer to reality with San Diego prototypes

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As debate in the nation’s capital has focused on health care, Russia and secret tapes, President Donald Trump’s signature proposal — building a “big, beautiful wall” on America’s southern border — has faded from the spotlight.

But preparations are quietly moving forward to start the first wall-related construction on California soil in the next few months, in an effort to translate campaign rally applause lines into cold, hard concrete.

Construction is scheduled to begin on four to eight wall prototypes by “late summer,” Acting Border Patrol Chief Carla Provost said at a recent congressional hearing. They’ll each be 30 feet long and 18 to 30 feet high, and designed to withstand climbing, tunneling and attempts to break through.

The slices of wall will go up in a dusty patch of federal land on the edge of the San Diego sprawl, several hundred feet north of the border. The site, at the foothills of the Otay mountains and about two miles east of the warehouses of San Diego’s Otay Mesa neighborhood, is surrounded by scrubby grassland. Across the border are busy, poor Tijuana neighborhoods.

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