Why Tuscaloosa Developer Stan Pate Bought Sections Of The Southern Border Wall

TUSCALOOSA, AL — When Tuscaloosa real estate mogul Stan Pate was in the seventh grade or so, he ran afoul of a hard-nosed teacher who punished him by making him write a 2,000-word essay on the topic in question.

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As Pate recalled, this was the age of the Polaroid camera and he got the clever idea to meet the terms of the assignment while saving himself a good bit of writing.

In doing so, he took two pictures of the subject of the essay, pasted them in a book and submitted the "essay" to the teacher with the simple line "if a picture is worth a thousand words, here it is."

That impish little boy would go on to overcome a hardscrabble youth to become one of Alabama's wealthiest and most influential businessmen. But his ability to tell a story in a way that grabs the attention has not changed a bit.

Indeed, on Thursday Pate took to social media and posted photos of himself along with several massive sections of the Southern border wall that he recently purchased off of a government auction website.

"In this particular case, the pictures are worth a thousand words," he told Patch at his office on Friday. "And if people are paying attention to it, it would be worth millions of votes for former President (Donald) Trump."

Pate has been a central figure in state and national politics since first helping Governor Guy Hunt get elected in 1986. A kingmaker in the Alabama Republican establishment, he has since gone from financing anti-Trump skywriting at the 2016 Rose Bowl to making regular visits to Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate and becoming the polarizing conservative's largest individual donor in Alabama in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election.

A man of deep-seated conviction more than blind partisan politics, AL.com reported over the summer that Pate had given nearly $270,000 to Trump's re-election campaign and other related political action committees — dwarfing all other individual contributors in Alabama by a substantial margin.

But when asked how he came to own thousands of pounds of fabricated steel intended for the Southern border wall, he said he made his purchase for pennies on the dollar from the government surplus auction website GovPlanet.

The website specializes in auctions for everything from surplus military vehicles, meals-ready-to-eat (MREs) and, at least for Pate's interest, the steel used for the wall along the border with Mexico.

"We're always buying what we think is valuable," he told me. "The government has an auction website and all of a sudden sections of the wall started popping up for sale. At first, I thought this can't be true. But then I said let's buy some of it and see."

He then commented with a laugh that some thought he bought the sections of the wall to then turn around and sell back to the federal government at a higher price following the November presidential election — a tactic that actually got Pate his start in business decades ago when he flipped a few pieces of factory equipment for his first big financial windfall.

That's not the case here, though, he explained, going on to say that his intentions were both to own a piece of history while underscoring what he views as government waste and incompetence.

After the pieces — weighing roughly 15,000 pounds each — were delivered to Tuscaloosa this week on flatbed trucks, Pate put on his showman hat and posed for pictures to highlight the true scale of the massive pieces of steel.

"The reason I decided to post about it, you can get into all this complicated messaging but it's about the ability to keep it real clear and get people to pay attention," he said. "First of all, we don't have a good visual of what the border wall looks like and I guess I didn't either. I know what tall is but standing beside it, I felt tiny. It's just so massive."

He went on to say that he started to install a few pieces of the wall on his property as a way to preserve history and said he is still mulling over how he plans to do so. He then took issue with Vice President and Democratic Presidential Nominee Kamala Harris and what he views as her lack of action relating to the Southern border.

"The idea that Vice President Harris would talk about her border policy when she's not been to the border, and what is happening is happening on her watch," Pate said. "They are actually selling the wall off, which makes absolutely no sense."

It should be noted here that Vice President Harris is scheduled to visit the U.S.-Mexico border on Friday, where she is expected to speak on immigration issues as she continues her campaign for the White House.

To Pate's credit, though, he is not the only one who has raised questions over sections of the border wall being sold at auction over recent months.

Newsweek reported last October that word of the auctions first surfaced in August 2023, which prompted Republicans to accuse the federal government of wasting taxpayers' money after President Joe Biden committed to filling gaps in the wall near Yuma, Arizona, due to an increased influx of undocumented migrants entering from the south.

At present, U.S. Border Patrol says roughly 650 miles of the border is partitioned by the vertical steel fence, with the remainder — a length nearly twice the size — consisting of the Rio Grande.

"We certainly would be better off to install it," Pate said. "The reality of it is, it's our government and it's a thing people really dislike about government. Harris is telling you about her border policy while the wall is being sold off. And not just the wall, they are selling acres and acres of the raw steel that was fabricated and we're buying it for pennies on the dollar."

Pate then gave a humorous hypothetical when he pondered the possibility that the steel tubing for the section of wall he just purchased could have been produced at nearby Hanna Steel, before being sent to the border and fabricated into its present state — only to end up on the back of a flatbed truck in the place it started.

"It really puts a spotlight on waste in government and that you can't believe what you're being told," he said. "It's about the cost and the wasting of the money. It's what we all know about government. And we're looking at the debt. No wonder we have debt when we have wasteful spending. We're selling off things that we're buying at the same time. To me, this is lying in plain sight."

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