Thread: ‘WE BUILD THE WALL’ DONORS DEMAND ANSWERS AFTER MONTHS OF NO CONSTRUCTION

‘WE BUILD THE WALL’ DONORS DEMAND ANSWERS AFTER MONTHS OF NO CONSTRUCTION

5:23 PM 05/11/2019 | USJason Hopkins | Energy Investigator


A “We Build The Wall” GoFundMe campaign quickly raised $22 million in online donations, but months after its launch and still no construction, donors are beginning to ask what’s being done with their money.
In the run-up to what became the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, all related to a debate over border wall spending, Purple Heart veteran Brian Kolfage launched aGoFundMe in December calling on people to privately fund a wall between the U.S. and Mexico.
The activist currently promises that his campaign would “do it for a fraction” of the cost it would take the government, telling The Washington Post in January that his project would cost in the range of $2 to $3 million per mile.
The campaign proved wildly popular. In the matter of weeks, the GoFundMe raised millions and has accumulated $22 million to date, much of it from small-dollar donations. A number of high-profile conservatives have since joined the fundraiser, such as former executive chairman of Breitbart Steve Bannon, former Secretary of State of Kansas Kris Kobach, “Sheriff” David Clarke and others. (RELATED: Border Wall GoFundMe Donors Taking Huge Risk In Giving To Brian Kolfage’s Nonprofit, Watchdogs Warn)
However, five months since it’s launch, not a single foot of wall has been built, and donors are beginning to demand answers.
“The lack of updates is very concerning,” Joshua Greene, a Washington state resident who donated to the campaign, said to The Daily Beast. Greene went on to say that he was aware of “previous shady GoFundMe campaigns” from Kolfage, but was confident this one would be legitimate since other “big names” joined on.
“I am very disappointed in you Brian Kolfage, where are the progress photographs?” a woman posted on the We Build The Wall Facebook Page, a comment first flagged by The Washington Post.
“I’ve been away for FIVE months,” one Twitter user wrote in April. “When’s the groundbreaking?”

A Mexican soldier stands guard in front of the border wall with the United States, outside of a sports centre used as a temporary shelter used for migrants in Tijuana, Mexico, November 21, 2018. REUTERS/Hannah McKay

After blowing past self-established deadlines, it’s still not clear when, or where, the wall will be built. Kolfage told Politico in February that his group would break ground by “May 1, June 1 at the latest.” During a radio interview in March, he said that they would begin in April.(RELATED: ‘Human F***ing Garbage’: Veterans, Strangers Defend Cancer Patient After Border Wall GoFundMe Founder Doxxed Her)
In an exchange with The Daily Caller News Foundation in March, Kolfage said they would “break ground next month on our first section of border wall.” The activist refused to provide TheDCNF with work permits as proof for this claim, asserting that his group needed to protect the privacy of landowners. When asked where construction would take place, Kolfage simply listed off southern border states.
Since the publication of this article, Kolfage has still not revealed when or where wall construction will begin.
“There’s no update because we are remaining silent for a very good reason. You all will have the best present very soon. Remember powerful people want to stop our progress, so to not tip anyone off we are radio silent!!” Kolfage wrote in a Facebook post on Saturday.
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https://dailycaller.com/2019/05/11/w...onors-answers/

FOR THE TIME BEING, I'm giving these guys a pass. In order to build just 1 single mile of wall, you need to get the project permitted, I assume, and you have to line up the contractors with the proper equipment and the material suppliers and have a delivery date for the materials to arrive. That's in addition to getting the wall designed. There's a TON of things involved here. As long as most of the $$$$ is accounted for, I'd give these guys a few more months to deliver something? It will take some of the $$$$ that has been raised just to get the project to point where the construction workers are on site and putting up just the 1st single section of it. I feel this group might have given a false impression on how fast this project could actually come about.

Border wall project secretly built over the weekend

FEDERAL AGENCIES PUSH BACK ON CLAIM THEY SANCTIONED PRIVATE BORDER WALL CONSTRUCTION

9:25 PM 05/29/2019 | INVESTIGATIVE GROUPAndrew Kerr | Investigative Reporter

• We Build the Wall founder Brian Kolfage said the Trump administration called the International Boundary and Water Commission, a federal agency, to authorize his organization’s construction of a private border wall.
• He also said the Department of Homeland Security approved his organization’s venture.
• Both agencies disputed Kolfage’s claim.

The founder of the nonprofit group that built a half-mile border wall over Memorial Day weekend said the Trump administration sanctioned the project, but two federal agencies disputed his claim Wednesday.
Triple amputee and Air Force veteran Brian Kolfage said Wednesday that the Trump administration called the International Boundary and Water Commission (IBWC) and authorized the construction on private property near El Paso, Texas. He also said that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) approved the venture.
However, a spokeswoman for the IBWC told The Daily Caller News Foundation it received no such call from the Trump administration regarding We Build The Wall, which is funded by the viral $20 million GoFundMe fundraising campaign Kolfage launched in December.
“We are not aware of any call from the administration, and there would be no reason for our authorization because it’s on private land,” said the spokeswoman for the U.S. section of the IBWC, Lori Kuczmanski.
Kolfage hinted on Twitter that he had evidence of the Trump administration’s authorization, but said he was “saving it for the media to break.”
We Build The Wall did not return a request for comment.
Kolfage’s tweet came one day after Sunland Park, New Mexico, issued a cease and desist order to the owner of the land where We Build The Wall’s barrier was constructed. The letter said it violated a city ordinance. (RELATED: Cease And Desist Letter Issued Over Private Border Wall)
“There was no survey submitted with the plans at this point. There’s no site plan developed or turned into the city of Sunland Park,” Sunland Park Mayor Javier Perea said at a press conference Tuesday. “Also, city ordinance only allows a wall up to six feet tall, and this far exceeds that.”
The DHS also pushed back on Kolfage, who told the Daily Mail on Monday that the agency approved his organization’s build.
“This project is not connected to DHS efforts,” a DHS spokeswoman told TheDCNF.

US workers are photographed during construction of a border wall. (AFP PHOTO/HERIKA MARTINEZ/Getty Images)

Kolfage also told the Daily Mail that former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach is representing We Build The Wall in talks with the DHS in an effort to receive “permission to build inside the Roosevelt Easement.”
The DHS spokeswoman would not say whether it was in talks with We Build The Wall. Key figures in Kolfage’s organization have close ties to President Donald Trump.
Steve Bannon, who served as Trump’s White House chief strategist in 2017, is We Build The Wall’s director. Kobach led Trump’s now-disbanded Presidential Advisory on Election Integrity alongside Vice President Mike Pence. The president was reportedly consideringKobach in May for a new “immigration czar” position to coordinate the administration’s immigration policies.
Trump has also “aggressively” pushed DHS to award a border wall contract with Fisher Industries, the North Dakota-based construction firm working with Kolfage’s organization, according to The Washington Post.
Fisher Industries CEO Tommy Fisher and Kobach have been featured in videos posted to We Build The Wall’s YouTube channel touting that they built the barrier in an area the Army Corps of Engineers said was too rugged to build on at a cost far lower than government estimates. The Office of Management and Budget said in January that the border wall would cost $24.4 million per mile, but Kolfage’s organization said it constructed a half-mile barrier for an estimated $6 to $8 million.
Kobach also said Fisher Industries used a much higher quality steel with a lifespan of 75 years for We Build The Wall’s barrier, compared to the 25-year lifespan of the steel used in the federal government’s existing border wall.
Fisher Industries filed a lawsuit against the federal government in April after it lost out on a lucrative contract to construct 50 miles of border fencing. The Army Corps of Engineers said the design submitted by Fisher Industries did not meet the “operational requirements” of Customs and Border Protection.
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https://dailycaller.com/2019/05/29/f...e-border-wall/

IT'S WAR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Bannon's group built the wall — a mile of it, anyway — over the weekend

Melissa Rossi 5 hours ago

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BARCELONA, Spain — In what might be seen as a Memorial Day gift to President Trump, residents of a mountain range outside of El Paso today woke up to a new vista—a mile-long wall of metal slats constructed along the border with Mexico that just shot up over the weekend. The secret project, which started on Friday evening and was completed by Monday morning, was the work of We Build the Wall, a new group whose director is the former White House strategist Steve Bannon. The CEO is Air Force veteran Brian Kolfage, who had raised $20 million to build the wall through his GoFundMe project, but it appeared to be floundering until Bannon took the helm.
Bannon, who for much of the weekend was in Kazakhstan for a geopolitical seminar, says the project, overseen by construction mogul Tommy Fisher of North Dakota-based Fisher Industries, involved hundreds of workers and cost $6 million.
He says his group asked local authorities what is the most dangerous part of the border with Mexico, and they were pointed to this precarious mountain strip, “where the cartels and asylum seekers are coming in” through a gap between two 21-mile strips of completed wall. The group hastily “purchased the rights” to the land and went at it Friday evening. “We had to catch them by surprise,” says Bannon, who predicts residents are “gonna freak out” when they see what was erected over the past two days.

Screenshot: We Build the WallPerhaps construction is Bannon’s new calling. His political activities in Europe geared to shift the EU to the hard right didn’t go as well as anticipated in parliamentary elections this weekend. The nationalist and populist parties he’s been advising across the continent — among them Italy’s La Lega, headed by Matteo Salvini, and France’s National Rally party of Marie Le Pen — did make gains in elections. Both parties came in first in their respective countries, with National Rally beating out La République en Marche party of French president Emmanuel Macron. However, others, such as Dutchman Geert Wilders’s anti-Islam Party of Freedom were trounced — losing all four of their currently held Parliament seats; the Bannon-advised anti-immigrant, anti-abortion Vox Party, a newcomer in Spain, which took 10 percent in last month’s national elections, scored scarcely 6 percent in this weekend’s elections. (Most EU countries saw record turnouts of over 50 percent.)
In total, the hard-right parties that Bannon had predicted would take at least 30 percent of seats — at points he suggested they might take half of the Parliament —causing an “earthquake” for the European Union, instead won scarcely 25 percent of seats. While the showing represented an increase over the 22 percent they gained in 2014 elections — it fell short of the one-third of the European Parliament’s 571 seats that would be required to form a bloc that could effectively hinder legislation and nominations to the higher ranks of the EU.
Melissa Rossi is a U.S. journalist based in western Europe
_https://www.yahoo.com/news/bannon-bu...140449962.html____

What these guys did was SO SO INCREDIBLE!!!!! It's 100% PROOF WE'RE GETTING SCREWED!!!!! BANNON WAS KICKED OUT OF THE WHITE HOUSE by KUSHNER and CO. and for a GOOD REASON!!!!! HE DELIVERS RESULTS and they had to get rid of him. TRUMP IS A FRAUD or BECAME A FRAUD!!!!! TAKE YOUR PICK!!!!!

Now send CONVOYS of trucks and buses of these invaders back home!!!

Load 'em up and move 'em ALL out of here!

New border wall being constructed by We Build the Wall in the El Paso, Texas, metropolitan area on May 24, 2019. (Courtesy of We Build the Wall, Inc.)

Veteran’s Private Border Wall Project Builds First Section Near El Paso After Raising $22 Million


BY CHARLOTTE CUTHBERTSON AND PETR SVAB
May 27, 2019 Updated: May 27, 2019Share



An Air Force veteran who lost three limbs in the Iraq War has built a wall on a short section of the U.S.-Mexico border, delivering on a promise to hundreds of thousands of donors.
Brian Kolfage raised more than $22 million and plans to build the wall mile-by-mile in strategic locations, getting permits from local private landowners.
Construction work started May 17 in the El Paso, Texas, metropolitan area, where an influx of illegal immigrants has drastically escalated in recent months—more than 600 percent in the Border Patrol’s El Paso sector in the first seven months of fiscal 2019, compared with the same period the year before.
The wall has a similar design to that used by the Trump administration, made of steel bollards buried several feet deep in the ground and standing 20 to 25 feet above ground. The first section is about a half-mile long and cost less than $10 million. That appears to be comparable to what the government has generally been paying for its wall construction. Kolfage said, however, that the price spiked due to difficult terrain and ended up less than what the government would have paid. He expects that on flat terrain his nonprofit could build for under $4 million a mile, well below the government’s average cost of about $20 million a mile.
“We can’t release full costs yet because of ongoing contracts we are in bid process with,” his press team said, via a text message.

The wall includes all the perks of the one built by the government, such as lighting, sensors, and access roads for the Border Patrol, the team said.
“Today is the big day!” Kolfage said in a May 26 tweet. “Today is the day the haters, the liberal media, and every doubter, chokes on their words. Check back later.”
The next day, he posted a promotional video showing heavy machinery installing sections of the wall.

“This is like our Superbowl. This is our time to shine. To show the donors, first and foremost, that we can be trusted, that we can get the job done,” he told The Epoch Times in a phone call.
He said about three more miles of the wall are slated for construction and should be paid for from the existing funding. His plan is to sell the wall to the government for $1, which would make the government responsible for its maintenance. The technology, such as surveillance cameras and seismic sensors (to detect tunneling under the wall), are compatible with and ready to be hooked into the Border Patrol systems, he said.
He’s also trying to negotiate with the government access to the Roosevelt Reservation (pdf), a 60-foot strip of land along the border in New Mexico, Arizona, and California under federal control. That could give the nonprofit hundreds of more miles to build on, if private funding allows, since large stretches of that border are now only covered by the anti-vehicle fencing, which is only about 5 feet tall and easy to climb over for pedestrians.
Overcoming Skepticism

Since he started his GoFundMe campaign, some media put Kolfage’s project, and even his integrity, in doubt. Rumors spread online about his misusing the donated funds, which have reached $22 million, although there’s no evidence he has.

A rumor that Kolfage may have bought a yacht with the donated money was spread by Grant Stern, a writer for Occupy Democrats, a left-wing progressive group, based on a single anonymous source. Kolfage said he bought the yacht months before the fundraiser started with money from selling his older boat.
Kolfage initially launched the GoFundMe campaign with a goal of crowdfunding $1 billion and donating it to the federal government for wall construction, saying he’d refund the donations if the goal wasn’t reached or almost reached. After raising some $20 million in 20 days, he indeed started to refund donations, but gave the donors an option to tell GoFundMe not to refund, in which case he would repurpose the donations for a wall built privately. About $6 million was refunded, but a single $6 million donation made up the difference, Snopes reported.
Setting up a nonprofit, We Build the Wall, the project established a website to solicit further donations.
The project has overcome some delays and has held back on some information, such as where it intends to build.
“We can’t go public with the information exactly because there are groups—different liberal groups—that do want to attack it and want to do everything to stop it,” Kolfage said at one of the project’s town halls.
Since the news broke that the nonprofit is following through on its promise, thousands of donations have streamed in, the GoFundMe page indicates.

Kolfage Story

Kolfage was severely injured in combat on Sept. 11, 2004, losing both legs and his right arm when an enemy rocket hit the Balad Air Base north of Baghdad.
After retiring from the military, Kolfage founded a coffee company, called Military Grade Coffee. In 2018, he took over from conservative columnist and author John Hawkins the management of the Right Wing News (RWN) Facebook page, which was followed by more than 3 million people.
Kolfage set up the RWNOfficial.com conservative political news and commentary website, and used the RWN and other Facebook pages to promote content from the site.
A cursory review of the site showed headlines in sensational tone and articles written as a mix of news and commentary.
On Oct. 11, 2018, all three Kolfage’s pages were shut down, including the one for his coffee business, with its more than 200,000 fans. Facebook said the sites were purged for breaking rules against “spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior.” Kolfage said that nothing of this applied to his business. He believed he was targeted for political reasons.
Kolfage acknowledged to NBC News that he was handling administration and finances for the now-defunct FreedomDaily website, which was known for inaccurate, sensational reporting.
FreedomDaily’s former employees said Kolfage used online petitions to collect email addresses, which were then used to distribute FreedomDaily content.
Update: The article has been updated with further information from Brian Kolfage, his press team, and his “We The People Will Build the Wall” GoFundMe page. Information has also been added about the U.S.-Mexico border and the barriers along it.

Follow Charlotte on Twitter: @charlottecuthbo
https://www.theepochtimes.com/vetera...n_2939565.html

INSANE: Cartel Gunmen Reportedly Brandish Rifles, Intimidate Border Wall Construction Crew

Wall construction workers received a reported intimidation attempt from cartel gunmen last night.

Published 12 hours ago on May 31, 2019
By Tom Pappert




Brian Kolfage, the veteran who started the viral We Build The Wall organization, revealed that cartel gunmen approached border wall construction crews brandishing rifles last night, seeking to intimidate them and prevent them from continuing the border wall construction.

Kolfage, the triple-amputee Air Force veteran and Purple Heart recipient who started the viral We Build The Wall campaign on GoFundMe, posted a tweet earlier today revealing that “15 armed cartel members with rifles dressed in camo approached our border wall last night intimidating construction crews”, and suggested his organization’s security was able to thwart the intimidation attempt.

Brian Kolfage @BrianKolfage

BREAKING: 15 armed cartel members with rifles dressed in camo approached our border wall last night intimidating construction crews. @gatewaypundit @OANN @DonaldJTrumpJr @RyanAFournier @DRUDGE @gehrig38 @WSJ @TrumpStudents @CBSNews @ABC @LouDobbs @FoxNews @realDonaldTrump

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12:05 PM - May 31, 2019 · Boundary Marker #1
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This report comes only one day after President Donald Trump posted a video to Twitter, showing over 1,000 illegal aliens crossing the United States-Mexico border illegally where the border wall has not been completed. They were then apprehended by authorities, in what represents the single largest apprehension in United States history.Big League Politics reported:

A stream of illegal aliens can be seen in the video pouring through an opening in what appears to be a chain link fence. The group can then be seen marching together in the same direction.The post comes amid reports that Trump is set to make a serious announcement regarding border security, but so far, those reports are varied. A Thursday morning POLITICO report said that Trump was going to announce a ban on asylum for Central Americans. A Thursday afternoon report in The Washington Post said that Trump plans to threaten Mexico with more tariffs if they do not work to secure the border.

Only last month, heavily armed men wielding what appear to be automatic rifles and submachine guns were seen escorting illegal immigrants across the border in a video released by Customs and Border Protection.Big League Politics reported:

The armed men exited a truck and escorted the woman and child across a section of border protected only by a small log fence. One of the smugglers accompanied the woman and child between an opening in the fence, onto U.S. soil, and two others remained on the Mexican side of the fence. After walking with the woman and child for several yards, the third man walked back through the fence to Mexico.
The smugglers can be seen traversing the border with ease, almost nonchalantly, highlighting the lack of border security at the U.S. southern border.

Kolfage’s wall project has already defied expectations and broken ground, as the veteran-turned-wall builder revealed in a viral video on Twitter that shows at least a half mile of the civilian-funded wall constructed along the border.

Brian Kolfage @BrianKolfage

WE MADE HISTORY! The first crowdsource funded international border wall! Paid for with donations from our @gofundme DONATE TODAY! @RyanAFournier @SebGorka @DRUDGE @PeteHegseth @SarahPalinUSA @TeamTrump @DonaldJTrumpJr @JesseBWatters @GOPLeader @TeamCavuto @TwitchyTeam

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11:23 AM - May 27, 2019

https://bigleaguepolitics.com/insane...truction-crew/

EXCLUSIVE VIDEO: “We Build the Wall” Completes First Half Mile of US Border Wall in 4 Days from Private Donations

May 27, 2019, 7:30 am by Jim Hoft 701 Comments