CBP Chief Says Border Wall Should Be Finished by Late 2027

The U.S. southern border wall will be completed by the end of next year, said U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Commissioner Rodney Scott at an event on Tuesday.

Scott told an audience in Washington that the “primary border wall … will be done by the end of 2027,” adding that there are a “couple of gaps.” The wall will stretch from San Diego to Texas near the Gulf of Mexico.

“The only places we’re not building a border wall is places where we’ve made a conscious decision that we don’t need it,” Scott said at the Center for Immigration Studies conference, adding that Big Bend National Park is an example of a “super remote area” with “some very, very high cliffs” that preclude construction of the wall.

Other parts of the border wall, including a secondary wall and a barrier in the Rio Grande, will be complete by July or August 2028, Scott said. The barrier will also be backed by electronic surveillance and other systems, he added.

The border wall, which was a campaign promise made by President Donald Trump during his 2016 presidential campaign, is designed to curb illegal immigration and drug trafficking into the United States.

But Scott said the wall isn’t enough to completely stop either one. Drug traffickers and human smugglers are using tunnels to find workarounds, he said.

“That is their business model, and drones definitely make it easier,” he said, adding, “They’re also smuggling narcotics across with drones.”

On the first day of his second term in January 2025, Trump signed an executive order directing the Department of War and Department of Homeland Security secretaries to “take all appropriate action to deploy and construct temporary and permanent physical barriers to ensure complete operational control of the southern border.” The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, approved by Congress in July 2025, included $46.5 billion for border wall construction.

Apprehensions of people crossing the border illegally in the Big Bend Sector fell 74 percent in fiscal 2025 compared with fiscal 2023, according to the CBP. Autonomous surveillance towers have also significantly reduced traffic, according to the agency.

Last month, the CBP released data marking a year of zero releases at the southern border, and apprehensions of illegal immigrants have dropped to their lowest levels in more than three decades.

The agency said that the Border Patrol recorded 8,943 apprehensions along the southwest border in April, a 94 percent decline from the monthly average under the Biden administration and 96 percent below the peak in December 2023.

“The U.S. Border Patrol released zero illegal aliens into our country again this month, unlike April 2024, when more than 68,000 were released under President [Joe] Biden,” Scott said in a statement in May.

The Trump administration has also prioritized deporting illegal immigrants.

The White House’s border czar, Tom Homan, said in an interview in May that the administration is moving to increase deportations and that around 800,000 illegal aliens have been removed from the country since Trump took office again.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.