US President-elect Joe Biden plans to immediately stop further construction of current President Donald Trump's signature southern border wall.
According to The Dallas Morning News, Biden will stop building the wall as he vowed to throughout his campaign but will leave in place what has already been built.
The 643km wall, situated on the border between the US and Mexico, has only expanded by a small 19km during Trump's time as president.
With the majority of the US$15 billion, the Trump administration spent on it going towards reinforcing and upgrading barriers that were already in place.
US acting homeland security secretary Chad Wolf says by the end of the year 724km of the wall will be completed with another 337km on the way.
At its current rate of construction, the wall may reach 756km before Biden is sworn in.
The aim of the wall Trump initially described as "big" and "beautiful" was to slow illegal immigrants and smugglers to allow time for US border patrol to intercept.
Many Republicans seeing the wall as not only a physical barrier to immigration but also as a symbol of the country's unwelcoming attitude towards immigrants.
Biden plans to dampen this attitude by undoing immigration policies put in place by the Trump administration via executive orders, such as the tight rules surrounding refugee admissions.
Policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute Jessica Bolter says the "easiest action" Biden can take as soon as he enters office, will be to remove the emergency declaration over the southern border - which allowed the Trump Administration to tap into the Pentagon budget for wall construction.
Texas Democrat representative Henry Cuellar told The Dallas Morning News, the 2020 US election, which saw citizens vote Trump out, was in itself a "referendum on the wall," showing voters are against further construction.
Cuellar was part of the Appropriations Committee that fought against Trump's budget moves which saw him take money from military spending to put towards the wall, following Congress' refusal to fund it.
Congress only provided $US4.4 billion out of the $US15 billion spent, with the majority of the money leached from the Army Corps of Engineers account.
Alongside hurdles such as slow construction, Trump's wall hasn't been the sturdiest with 40m of the fence blown over by a 48km/h breeze earlier this year.
