One of the most divisive but crucial elements to Donald Trump becoming president was him promise to the American people that he would construct a 400-mile-long wall across the Mexico/USA border in a physical effort to prevent people illegally entering the country.
But now a video of an eight-year-old girl scaling an 18-foot-high replica of President Donald Trump's southern border wall has gone viral after the footage was shared to Facebook by her mom.
Check out the impressive footage in the video below:Lucy Hancock of South Carolina utilized a belay (a device that helps support climbers and prevent them from falling) in order to traverse the huge structure, using only her hands and feet to pull herself up. An adult climber by the name of Erik Kloeker was up and over the wall in roughly 40 seconds
Per TIME, Trump claimed the wall would be "virtually impenetrable" while visiting San Diego last month, and boasted: "This wall can't be climbed - it is very, very hard. And what that panel does on top is - it is structural - but it's also very, very hard to get by that panel."
However, despite the claims, the eight-year-old was able to conquer the structure in under one minute, in a video shared by her mother, Karla.
President Trump claims his border wall is "virtually impenetrable" in San Diego visit:The replica wall was constructed by Rick Weber at the Muir Valley rock climbing park in Rogers, Kentucky. After hearing President Trump boast about the wall's integrity, he told TIME that he saw Trump's claims as a challenge: "You don’t tell a bonafide rock climber something’s impossible to climb."
Weber insists that his wall has been constructed with the same official dimensions as Trump's wall, and has been modelled from recent images of the structure. This weekend, he will challenge climbers attending the 'Rocktoberfest' rock climbing festival at the nearby Red River Gorge canyon system in Kentucky to attempt to scale his model - seeing who can set the fastest time.
Karla Hancock told TIME that her daughter has always shown a natural inclination towards both politics and rock climbing, but that she has recently struggled to come to terms with the government's stance on immigration: "To [Lucy], it’s black and white: If somebody’s hungry, and you have the means to give to them, why couldn’t you?"
In an official statement from the Whitehouse, Trump said that 20 world-class mountain climbers were given the challenge of climbing a prototype of the wall, with this final design being the "hardest to climb":
"We actually built prototypes and we have, I guess you could say, world-class mountain climbers. [...] We had 20 mountain climbers. That’s all they do; they love to climb mountains [...] and some of them were champions. And we gave them different prototypes of walls, and this was the one that was hardest to climb."