The Biden administration discreetly announced Thursday that it would add a new section of the border wall with Mexico to stem migrant arrivals, echoing a flagship measure of former President Donald Trump.
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The information immediately met with widespread criticism, as Joe Biden had reiterated on the day he took office in January 2021 that taxpayers would no longer pay for the construction of a wall on the border.
“Building a massive wall across the entire southern border is not a serious political solution,” Mr. Biden said.
But on Thursday his administration announced that around twenty federal laws, such as environmental and wildlife protection laws, would have to be repealed to allow the construction of this new part.
“There is currently an acute and immediate need to construct physical barriers and roads near the U.S. border to prevent illegal entries,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in an official statement published by the Federal Register.
The new section will be built in the Rio Grande Valley, an area where there is a “large number of illegal entries” at the border between the two countries, Mr. Mayorkas said.
Over a 10-month period ending in early August, more than 245,000 illegal entry attempts were recorded, he said.
Mr. Mayorkas said the funding for “additional physical barriers” would come from an appropriation that Congress approved for that specific purpose in 2019, when Mr. Trump was in office.
Illegal immigration is a growing political problem for Mr. Biden, who is running for re-election in 2024 and is overwhelmed by Republicans who accuse him of laxity.
Mr. Trump, his rival and right-wing favorite for the next presidential election, did not fail to respond.
The Biden administration’s announcement shows that “I was right when I built 900 km (…) of beautiful, brand new border wall,” he wrote on his Truth Social platform.
“Will Joe Biden apologize to me and America for taking so long to move and allowing our country to be flooded with 15 million illegal immigrants from unknown places?” he added.
Comments also increased among Republican elected representatives.
“When he ran for president, Biden vowed never to build another inch of wall along the southern border. Now Biden is accelerating construction of a new wall about 20 miles long. Joe finally realizes that walls work,” Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn joked on X (formerly Twitter).