WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Joe Biden’s administration said on Thursday it will add sections to a border wall to prevent record migrant crossings from Mexico, carrying forward a signature policy of former President Donald Trump.
Trump is the favorite for the Republican Party nomination to challenge Democrat Biden in the 2024 presidential race. Trump made building border barriers a central tenet of his first presidential campaign with the slogan “Build that wall.”
One of Biden’s first actions after taking office in January 2021 was issue a proclamation promising that “no more American taxpayer dollars will be diverted to build a border wall,” as well as a review of all resources that had already been committed.
The administration said Thursday’s action did not deviate from Biden’s proclamation because money appropriated under Trump in 2019 needed to be spent now.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a statement that “there was no new Administration policy regarding border walls. From day one, this Administration has made it clear that a border wall is not the answer.”
Mayorkas said the construction project was appropriated during the previous administration and that the government is required by law to use the funds, as announced earlier this year. “We have repeatedly asked Congress to rescind this money, but it has not done so and we are required to follow the law,” he said.
Trump, however, was quick to claim victory and demand an apology.
“As I have often said, for thousands of years, there are only two things that have worked consistently: wheels and walls!” Trump wrote on social media. “Will Joe Biden apologize to me and the United States for taking so long to get moving…”
The president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, described the measure as “one step back“.
IMMIGRATION A POLITICAL ISSUE
Immigration will likely be a campaign issue in the US presidential race, where a majority of Americans (54%) agree with the statement that “immigration is making life more difficult for native-born Americans,” according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll from September.
About 73% of Republicans and 37% of Democrats surveyed agreed with that statement.
The Biden administration’s decision to move forward with border barriers will expose the president to criticism from his left-wing base, including immigration advocates and environmentalists who oppose more construction.
In a notice published in the Federal Register on Thursday, Biden’s Department of Homeland Security said it needed to waive a number of laws, regulations and other legal requirements to build barriers in Starr County, Texas.
The county is in the Rio Grande Valley sector, where Border Patrol agents have encountered more than 245,000 people entering the United States this fiscal year, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in the post. of the Federal Register.
Members of the Texas National Guard try to discourage migrants from climbing over barbed wire after crossing the Rio Grande in Eagle Pass, Texas, U.S., September 29, 2023. REUTERS/Brian Snyder/File Photo Acquire license rights
“There is currently an acute and immediate need to construct physical barriers and roads in the vicinity of the United States border to prevent illegal entries,” he said.
Environmentalists expressed their discontent.
“Starr County is home to some of the most spectacular and biologically important habitats remaining in Texas,” Laiken Jordahl, a southwest conservation advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity, which has opposed the wall, said in a statement, ” and now the bulldozers are preparing to go through it.”
The White House in a statement said it has taken a different approach to trying to fix the “broken immigration system” that they said Biden “inherited,” including increasing legal avenues for immigrants and investing in security technology. border.
FIGHT AGAINST RECORD MIGRANT CROSSINGS
The administration has been struggling operationally and politically with a record number of migrant crossings at the US-Mexico border during Biden’s term, reaching new highs. in September.
Biden initially promised to reverse many of Trump’s immigration policies but kept in place a COVID-era public health order known as Title 42, which allowed border agents to expel migrants to Mexico without the ability to apply for asylum.
When Title 42 expired on May 11 of this year, the Biden administration replaced it with a strict new rule requiring immigrants to schedule an appointment on a government-run smartphone app before approaching a legal port of entry. either face tougher barriers to obtaining asylum if they cross the border illegally.
Initially, the number of immigrants plummeted after the announcement of the new rule, but in recent weeks started to rise again, driven in part by thousands of migrants fleeing Venezuela.
In another major law enforcement action announced Thursday, Biden administration officials said they would resume deportation flights to Venezuelawhich had been suspended due to the cold relations between the two countries.
Hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans, many of them fleeing economic and political turmoil in their country, have walked through the treacherous jungle region between Colombia and Panama known as the Darien Gap to reach the US-Mexico border in the last two years.
The surge in migrants has strained American cities on the border and further north. Asylum seekers can be released into the country to pursue their claims in immigration courts, where more than 2 million cases are pending, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, and which often take years to resolve.
Republican governors near the border, who say Biden is not doing enough to stop the crossings, have bussed some migrants arriving in Democratic-controlled cities like New York and Chicago, and some Democratic leaders there now too They criticize Biden.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams on Thursday began a trip to Mexico, Colombia and Ecuador to tell would-be migrants that his city cannot take them after local shelter systems have been overwhelmed.
About 11 million immigrants are in the United States without legal documentation, says the Washington-based Migration Policy Institute. Many have lived and worked in the country for years or decades.
Biden attempted early in his term to get a comprehensive immigration reform bill through Congress, but Republican opposition thwarted progress.
Reporting by Mica Rosenberg in New York and Nandita Bose in Washington; Additional reporting by Doina Chiacu, Jason Lange and Jeff Mason in Washington, Raúl Cortés and Dave Graham in Mexico City and Kristina Cooke in San Francisco; Editing by Heather Timmons, Howard Goller, and Grant McCool
Our standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
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