The Biden administration has authorized the construction of a new section of border wall in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley. It’s a reversal of President Joe Biden’s campaign promise that “not another foot” of border wall would be constructed under his purview that comes as the president faces increasing pressure from Republicans — and members of his own party — to reduce rising border crossings.
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a notice in the Federal Register that there is “presently an acute and immediate need” to build the new border wall to prevent unauthorized border crossings. He waived dozens of federal laws in approving the plans to construct the wall, including the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Clean Air Act.
The Rio Grande Valley sector of the border alone has seen nearly 300,000 migrant encounters between October 2022 and August of this year, according to data from US Customs and Border Protection. Apprehensions of migrants are also high across the border, with those numbers reaching a peak for this year at more than 200,000 in September.
Biden argues that he had no choice in whether the border wall project moved forward. In the Oval Office Thursday, he noted that the money that will be used to construct the wall was appropriated in 2019 under the Trump administration and claimed that it must be used for that purpose.
“I tried to get them to reappropriate it, to redirect that money,” he said. “They didn’t. They wouldn’t.”
Still, it’s hard to see how the project isn’t politically expedient for him when he’s facing pressure from both parties to bring the number of border crossings down.
Republicans are reiterating calls for Mayorkas’s impeachment, claiming he’s been ineffective. Former President Donald Trump — the 2024 Republican frontrunner whose calls to “build the wall” across the entire southern border…
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