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President Joe Biden’s administration said yesterday it will add sections to a border wall to stave off record migrant crossings from Mexico, embracing a signature policy of former president Donald Trump.
Trump is the frontrunner for the Republican Party nomination to challenge Biden, a Democrat, in the 2024 presidential race. Trump made building border barriers a central tenet of his first campaign for president with the rally chant, “Build That Wall.”
One of Biden’s first actions after taking office in January 2021 was to issue a proclamation pledging that “no more American taxpayer dollars be diverted to construct a border wall” as well as a review of all resources that had already been committed.
The administration said yesterday’s action did not deviate from Biden’s proclamation because money that was allocated during Trump’s term in 2019 had to be spent now.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a statement that there was “no new administration policy with respect to border walls. From day one, this Administration has made clear that a border wall is not the answer.”
Mayorkas said the construction project was appropriated during the prior administration and the law requires the government to use the funds, with an announcement made earlier in the year. “We have repeatedly asked Congress to rescind this money but it has not done so and we are compelled to follow the law,” he said.
Trump, however, was quick to claim victory and demand an apology.
“As I have stated often, over thousands of years, there are only two things that have consistently worked, wheels, and walls!” Trump wrote on social media. “Will Joe Biden apologise to me and America for taking so long to get moving...”
Mexico’s President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador called the move “a step backwards.”
Immigration will likely be a campaign theme in the US presidential race with a majority of Americans (54 per cent) agreeing with the statement that “immigration is making life harder for native-born Americans,” a September Reuters/Ipsos poll found.
Some 73pc of Republicans and 37pc of Democrats surveyed agreed with that statement.
The Biden administration decision to move forward with the border barriers will open the president to criticism from his left-leaning base, including immigration advocates and environmentalists opposed to more construction.
In a notice published in the Federal Register yesterday, Biden’s Department of Homeland Security said it needed to waive a number of laws, regulations and other legal requirements to construct barriers in Starr County, Texas.
The county is in Rio Grande Valley Sector where Border Patrol agents have encountered more than 245,000 people entering the US this fiscal year, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in the Federal Register post.
“There is presently an acute and immediate need to construct physical barriers and roads in the vicinity of the border of the United States in order to prevent unlawful entries,” he said.
Environmentalists voiced their displeasure.
“Starr County is home to some of the most spectacular and biologically important habitat left in Texas,” said Laiken Jordahl, Southwest conservation advocate at the Centre for Biological Diversity, which has opposed the wall, in a statement, “and now bulldozers are preparing to rip right through it.”
The White House in a statement said it has taken a different approach to try to fix the “broken immigration system” they said Biden “inherited,” including increasing legal pathways for migrants and investing in border security technology.
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