“Building a massive wall across the entire southern border is not a serious political solution,” Joe Biden proclaimed when he became president of the United States. However, his administration discreetly announced on Thursday, October 5, that it planned to add a new section of the border wall with Mexico to stem the arrival of migrants, adopting a controversial flagship measure from former President Donald Trump.
While Joe Biden reiterated on the day he took office in January 2021 that taxpayers would no longer pay for the construction of a border wall, his administration announced on Thursday that around twenty federal laws, such as the environmental and wildlife protection laws, should be suspended to enable 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.
Funds approved under Donald Trump’s presidency
Mr. Mayorkas explained that 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.
The information was immediately commented on in detail on the right-hand side. Donald Trump, his rival and the right-wing favorite for the next presidential election, did not miss the opportunity to react. 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.
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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 the social network X (formerly Twitter).
This announcement was also greeted with skepticism by Mexico. “This approval for the construction of the wall is a step backwards because it does not solve the problem. We have to fight the causes,” replied Mexican President Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador.