“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. His administration, however, discreetly announced Thursday, October 5, that it intended to add a new section to the border wall with Mexico to try to limit the arrival of migrants, taking up a flagship and controversial measure of former President Donald Trump.
While Joe Biden had affirmed on the day he took office, in January 2021, that the taxpayer would no longer pay for the construction of a border wall, his government announced Thursday that around twenty federal laws, such as legislation on the environment and protected species, should be suspended to allow the construction of this new portion.
“There is currently an acute and immediate need to construct physical barriers and roads near the United States border to prevent illegal entry,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in an advisory. official published by the United States Federal Register.
The new section will be erected in the Rio Grande Valley, an area that experiences a “large number of illegal entries” on the border between the two countries, Mayorkas said. More than 245,000 illegal entry attempts were recorded over ten months until the beginning of August, he said.
Funds approved under the presidency of Donald Trump
Mr. Mayorkas explained that funds for “additional physical barriers” would come from an allocation approved by Congress for this 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 has been dogged by Republicans, who accuse him of laxity.
The information was immediately widely commented on on the right. Donald Trump, his rival and favorite of the right for the next presidential election, did not fail to react. The Biden administration’s announcement shows that “I was right when I built 900 km (…) of a 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 places unknown? “, he added.
Comments also multiplied among Republican elected officials. “When he ran for president, Biden vowed to never build “another inch of wall” along the southern border. Now Biden is accelerating construction of about 20 miles of new wall. Joe finally realizes that walls work,” joked Marsha Blackburn, senator from Tennessee, on the social network X (formerly Twitter).
This announcement was also received with skepticism by Mexico. “This authorization for the construction of the wall is a step backwards because it does not solve the problem, we must tackle the causes” of illegal immigration, responded Mexican President Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador.