President Joe Biden’s White House repeatedly insists that the invasion at the U.S. Southern border is “not a crisis” but waived 26 federal laws this week so that it can resume construction of former President Donald Trump’s border wall and curb the millions of illegal migrants inundating border officials.
Mere weeks after the Department of Defense was caught “quietly” auctioning off millions of dollars of barrier parts, Biden’s Department of Homeland Security announced plans to rebuild a portion of the fortification separating the U.S. and Mexico.
The border wall project, assigned to DHS in a 2019 appropriations bill, is expected to cover 17 miles in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas where many illegal border crossings occur.
The Biden administration’s decision to simply waive more than two dozen laws without scrutiny is a slap in the face to Republicans like Trump who had to jump through judiciary hoops every time he tried to secure the Southern border.
It’s also yet another major flip-flop for Biden who, even before he was elected, swore off of physical barriers as an effective illegal immigration deterrent.
“There will not be another foot of wall constructed on my administration, No. 1,” he told NPR in August 2020.
On day one in the Oval Office, Biden scaled back several Trump-era border protections and halted Southern border wall construction. By April 2021, Biden’s DOD canceled the border wall construction contracts completely and diverted the funds to other Pentagon pet projects.
DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas previously told the House Homeland Security Committee under oath that he supported Biden’s decision to halt construction of the wall.
Millions of record-breaking illegal border crossings later, Mayorkas has changed his tune.
“There is presently an acute and immediate need to construct physical barriers and roads in the vicinity of the border of the United States in order to prevent unlawful entries into the United States,” Mayorkas wrote in his announcement waiving federal laws to restart barrier building.
The “acute and immediate need” Mayorkas refers to is the influx of illegal border crossers who have spent the last two years flooding underequipped regions and crowding already overpopulated cities.
Migrants rushed to the U.S.-Mexico border shortly after Biden was elected because he promised to abandon the border wall, ditch Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” program, and scale back ICE arrests and deportations.
August alone yielded 232,972 illegal border crosser arrests. Another surge in September means 2023 apprehensions are on track to outpace the nearly 2.4 million illegal border crossers arrested in the 2022 fiscal year. Those numbers don’t even include the estimated tens of thousands more “gotaways” who evade arrest every month.
