Texas lawmakers quietly stopped funding the state construction of a border wall between the United States and Mexico just four years after Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) signed off on the project. 

In the final hours of this year’s legislative session, the Republican-controlled state legislature stripped the project of its funding, leaving its future unclear. The state has completed just 8%, or 65 miles, of the 805 miles it aimed to construct and has cost Texas taxpayers more than $3 billion, according to the Texas Tribune.

In this year’s budget, lawmakers approved $3.4 billion for border security, but Republican state Sen. Joan Huffman, the state’s lead budget writer, confirmed to the outlet that none of that money will go toward the wall.

“It’s not that we don’t think it’s an ongoing need to secure the border,” said Huffman. “It should have always been a function of the federal government, in my opinion, and that wasn’t really being done.”

President Donald Trump repeatedly said during his first campaign that the U.S. would build the wall and “make Mexico pay for it.” But during his first term, the administration completed just 21 miles of the project in Texas and only 452 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border, the majority of which was replacing existing structures at the border, across the 2,000-mile southern border. 

Trump has not shown renewed interest in picking up the border wall project at the federal level. He has signaled that deporting undocumented immigrants is viewed as a higher priority in his second term, over building the physical wall.

Texas’s state wall is not a contiguous structure, consisting of dozens of fragmented sections scattered along the border. The Texas-Mexico border is roughly 1,200 miles.

TEXAS REPUBLICANS MOVE TO CLOSE STATE PRIMARIES

The state’s efforts have been hindered in part by landowners on the border who have refused to let the state build a wall on their property. Most of Texas’s land along the Rio Grande is privately owned, and state lawmakers previously banned the use of eminent domain for wall construction. 

As of March, 24% of property owners along the border declined to house the wall on their land, which amounted to 41 miles of wall route that the state sought to take control of.