Joe Biden’s administration has abandoned the president’s campaign pledge against building any more barriers on the US-Mexico border, saying it will construct a new section of the controversial wall started by predecessor Donald Trump to help stem the heavy flow of illegal aliens into the country.
“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 into the United States in the project areas,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said on Wednesday in a public filing.
The need is so acute, in fact, that the administration will waive dozens of federal laws and regulations to fast-track the project, which will be built in Starr County, Texas, Mayorkas conceded. The area is experiencing “high illegal entry” by migrants into the US, he added. Starr County is in a sector of the Rio Grande Valley where Border Patrol officers encountered more than 245,000 illegal aliens trying to cross into the US between last October and August.
The decision comes amid a border crisis that has spread from the southern US states to such Democrat-run cities as New York and Chicago. New York Mayor Eric Adams warned last month that the influx of illegal aliens “will destroy New York City.”
Biden’s Democrat allies have long favored lax border policies, touting their communities as “sanctuary cities,” but with the crisis now hitting home as illegal aliens are bused to their areas, the mood has shifted. Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker said on Tuesday that the pace of migrant arrivals has created an “untenable situation.”
Biden pledged during his 2020 campaign for the presidency that he wouldn’t allow any more border barriers to be built in the US. Speaking to a group of black and Hispanic reporters just three months before the election, he vowed, “There will not be another foot of wall constructed on my administration, No. 1.”
On his first day in office, he issued an executive order revoking the emergency declaration that former President Trump had used to divert defense funds for wall construction. He called border barriers a “waste of money that diverts attention from genuine threats to our homeland security.”
Trump, who is polling as the leading Republican candidate to face Biden in the 2024 presidential election, mocked his successor for changing course on the border wall. “So interesting to watch Crooked Joe Biden break every environmental law in the book to prove that I was right when I built 560 miles . . . of brand new, beautiful border wall,” Trump said on Thursday in a Truth Social post. He added, “Will Joe Biden apologize to me and America for taking so long to get moving and allowing our country to be flooded with 15 million illegal immigrants, from places unknown? I will await his apology.”
Border funding approved by Congress during the Trump era will be used to pay for the new wall project. The funding would have expired if the money wasn’t spent during the government’s current fiscal year.