Texas Border Wall Fundraising Tops $450k In One Week
Texas Governor Greg Abbott recently announced that the State of Texas would begin raising money to build a border wall in Texas. The Governor also announced that the State would put forward $250 million to get things moving on the wall, but there is still no timeline or even final cost for the project.
We also don't know exactly where a border wall would go. Those answers are supposed to come at a later date.
What we do know is that Governor Abbott directed the state to raise money for the wall, sort of like crowdfunding the project. That way regular Texans and people across the United States could join in on fixing what is broken along the border.
According to the Texas Tribune, in the first week of the fundraiser, over $450 million dollars was raised.
Over the span of about a week, Texas received $459,000 in private donations for the state’s planned wall at the southern border, the governor’s office said Wednesday.
This comes after Gov. Greg Abbott said he would reallocate $250 million in state funds as a “down payment” for the project — while crowdfunding some of the remaining costs.
The identities of the donors and how much they donated to the wall construction are not readily available and can only be obtained through public information requests, a spokesperson for Abbott said. Eventually, Abbott’s office said, the total donations figure will be available online on a website that currently solicits people to donate.
While the $450k is a drop in the bucket compared to how much a wall would cost, some estimates put that cost at $26 to $46 million dollars per mile, Texas has already raised more money than Arizona did when they attempted to raise money in 2011. By 2014, Arizona had raised just $270,000 for a wall and the project was abandoned.