Trump looks to build a sliver of his border wall. The biggest beneficiary may be Cemex.

In January 2018, contractors working for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security will begin to fulfill what President Donald Trump has promised: building “a big, beautiful wall” that will separate the United States of America from Los Estados Unidos de Mexico. The path of least resistance to breaking ground on the first segment of the controversial border barrier runs through the Santa Ana Wildlife Refuge, 2,080 acres of richly biodiverse federal land on a meandering stretch of the Rio Grande in South Texas.

What has played out in South Texas over the past several months is a prelude to Trump’s larger wall-building project, as the DHS and U.S. Customs and Border Protection play fast and loose with the rules, and muscle anyone who gets in their way.

When site surveying began in the Santa Ana Wildlife Refuge (as first reported in The Texas Observer), DHS officials had not even filed applications for environmental waivers required to begin construction, a strategy critics described as a conscious attempt to keep the public in the dark. Nor did the department waste any time on cartography, opting instead to replicate maps created by Dannenbaum Engineering, a firm whose lavish contributions to elected officials responsible for approving contracts in South Texas have led to an ongoing investigation by the FBI.

Challenges aside, the administration in its desperation is effectively constructing a showpiece built to hoodwink a public worried about border security. What critics describe as a “Trump vanity project” will be 2.9 miles of concrete and metal barrier connected to nothing – a freestanding wall on a levee.

“They are building it here because they can,” Scott Nicol, co-chair of the Sierra Club Borderlands Campaign, told me. Nicol has concluded that because the Trump administration feels the need build something, the feds have set their sights on the tractable Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge. Securing right-of-way to build a fence through someone’s cow pasture, sorghum field, oil-and-gas lease or backyard can take years. Here, on federally owned land, it can be months.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office estimates the wall will cost bewteen $15 billion and $25 billion. The investment firm Alliance Bernstein did an analysis, and in a July 2016 publication for construction material suppliers and investors, dismissed Trump’s $10 billion estimate as too low.

Bernstein researchers also surveyed aggregate suppliers along the border and predict the biggest two winners could be Mexican companies Cemex and GCG. (Cemex has a slight edge because it has plants on both sides of the border.) Ironically, Trump’s wall-building project could provide economic stimulus to Mexico.

The Bernstein report concludes: “As ludicrous as the Trump Wall project sounds (to us at least), it represents a huge opportunity for those companies involved in its construction.”

LOU DUBOSE is The Washington Spectator’s senior political writer.