No need for full border wall, Trump says

WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump, who made the building of a wall along the border with Mexico a central promise of his campaign, significantly scaled back the pledge Thursday.

“You don’t need 2,000 miles of wall because you have a lot of natural barriers,” Trump said to reporters on Air Force One during his flight to Paris.

“You have mountains. You have some rivers that are violent and vicious. You have some areas that are so far away that you don’t really have people crossing. So you don’t need that.”

“You’ll need anywhere from 700 to 900 miles,” he said.

About 600 miles of the southern border already are protected by walls, fences or other barriers. It was unclear from Trump’s remarks whether the figure he cited referred to new border protections or included those already in existence, but he appeared to suggest that fixing current border fences would count against the total he had in mind.

“You know, we’ve already started the wall because we’re fixing large portions of wall right now,” he said. “We’re taking wall that was good but it’s in very bad shape, and we’re making it new.”

Trump also offered a very different description of the border barrier than he portrayed in campaign rallies, where he would sometimes talk about a wall 30 feet high.

His new description closely resembles the border fencing built under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

“You need transparency. You have to be able to see through it,” Trump said.

“In other words, if you can’t see through that wall – so it could be a steel wall with openings, but you have to have openings because you have to see what’s on the other side of the wall.”

That physical description and his account of the extent of the wall he has in mind bring the president’s version of the barrier much closer to what his Homeland Security secretary, John F. Kelly, and his deputies have described.

Trump’s comments to the reporters on the plane initially were off the record – a standard practice during previous administrations as well as the current one. But the president decided to put the conversation on the record, and White House officials released a transcript Thursday afternoon.