Federal officials are handpicking companies who want a shot at building a border wall — but it's not yet clear whether any contractors from Texas, where the longest stretch will be, are still in the running.
About 40 companies in the state expressed interest in participating in the project in some capacity. The majority on the list appear to be subcontractors, vying for smaller chunks of work in what would be a mammoth-scale structure that would traverse about 2,000 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border.
It appeared only a handful of Texas businesses proposed actually overseeing the project, designing and constructing a wall.
Nationwide, hundreds of companies responded to the request for proposals.
At stake now is only the construction of a prototype — not an award for the construction of a border wall itself — to show federal administrators what the contractors’ border wall designs would look like in real-life.