NORTHBRIDGE, Mass. — A company in Worcester County is hoping that the wall along the Mexican border starts in New England.
Riverdale Mills, located in Northbridge, makes metal mesh that is used to construct everything from chicken feeders to lobster traps.
CEO Jim Knott Jr. said his company also has experience making security fencing.
On Wednesday, President Donald Trump signed an executive to jump-start work on a project to build a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico.
“I think we’re positioned better than most people in the country to do this product,” Knott said.
In 2008, Riverdale Mills was hired as a subcontractor to help build a 23-mile section of border fencing.
“Typically, what they’ve done in the past is these are 20 feet tall and 5 feet in the ground so that you can’t tunnel under,” Knott said.
He said thin spacing between the fences’ wires make them virtually impossible to climb and military testing has shown they are harder to cut than other fences.
“If you take a piece of chain-link, for example, a special forces person can go through that chain-link in probably six seconds. But this product, it takes 45 minutes,” he said.
Knott said he has not yet had any contact with the Trump administration and it is too early to estimate how much such a contract might be worth.
He said it would most certainly require adding to the factory’s current 185-person workforce.
“It’s work that pays a good wage and would be good for the country,” he said.
Trump has insisted many times the border structure will be a wall.
The order he signed referred to “a contiguous, physical wall or other similarly secure, contiguous and impassable physical barrier.”
To build the wall, the president is relying on a 2006 law that authorized several hundred miles of fencing along the 2,000-mile frontier.
How Trump plans to pay for the wall project is murky.
While he has repeatedly promised that Mexico will foot the bill, U.S. taxpayers are expected to cover the initial costs and the new administration has said nothing about how it might compel Mexico to reimburse the money.
In an interview with ABC News, Trump said, “There will be a payment; it will be in a form, perhaps a complicated form.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.