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“President Joe Biden's administration said on Thursday it will add sections to a border wall to stave off record migrant crossings from Mexico… Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a statement that there was ‘no new Administration policy with respect to border walls. From day one, this Administration has made clear that a border wall is not the answer.’ Mayorkas said the construction project was appropriated during the prior administration and the law requires the government to use the funds…
“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 construct barriers in Starr County, Texas… ‘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,’ [Mayorkas] said.” Reuters
The right supports building the wall as a long overdue measure to mitigate the border crisis.
“Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has said for years that the border is secure. Now, all of a sudden, he sees a need to begin building a border wall… ‘The border is secure,’ Mayorkas told us in April of this year, a month that included nearly 212,000 crossings. ‘Our borders are not open,’ he said a few weeks later in May after another 206,000 crossings. He said it in January of this year (157,000 crossings), May of last year (241,000 crossings), and March 2021 (his third month on the job, when border crossings nearly doubled to 173,000).”
Zachary Faria, Washington Examiner
“The Biden White House is waiving no fewer than 26 federal laws — including the Clean Air Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act, among others — to construct the additional miles of wall with all due alacrity. Given the administration’s sensitivity to criticism from its left flank, this is not an initiative this White House would pursue if it had a choice…
“Biden’s own Government Accountability Office warned that border-wall development had ‘caused significant damage and destruction’ to the local environment and Native American cultural sites. It is a testament to the absolute urgency of the crisis at the border that the Biden White House has subordinated these powerful political incentives to the necessity of reducing the influx of migrants crossing into U.S. territory by every available means…
“Surely some of the Democratic Party’s more devoted ideologues will continue to object to the border wall’s construction, but the demands of partisan politics will now force most of the party’s stalwarts to retroactively ratify Trump’s instincts when it comes to border enforcement. The Biden administration’s actions have put the lie to the notion that physical countermeasures at the border are both useless and racist.”
Noah Rothman, National Review
“Biden's 180-degree turn is less a change of heart and more the octogenarian's basic calculation of dollars, common sense, and the impending doom and gloom in the polls. Worst for Biden is that the complaints about the border crisis are no longer even primarily coming from Republicans. Eric Adams, the mayor of New York City who obviously is no white supremacist, has escalated from publicly begging the president to do something about the issue to straight-up flying to Colombia to figure out for himself what the hell is going on…
“Until Biden took office, the record for the most border crossings in a single year was set in 2000, when Border Patrol recorded 1.7 million encounters. The record was then surpassed in 2021 with 1.96 million encounters and then again in 2022 with 2.7 million encounters. Without the final month of fiscal 2023, border crossings were already at 2.8 million. The influx from the last year alone is equivalent to nearly 1% of the entire U.S. population.”
Tiana Lowe Doescher, Washington Examiner
The left opposes building the wall, arguing that it will harm the environment without effectively stopping illegal migration.
The left opposes building the wall, arguing that it will harm the environment without effectively stopping illegal migration.
“There is no doubt that the situation at the southern border has become a crisis… But building more walls is not the solution. Just ask candidate Joe Biden. In 2020, he promised that ‘not another foot’ of the wall would be built if he were elected. Shortly after he took office in 2021, Biden released a proclamation that said building a wall on the southern border is ‘a waste of money that diverts attention from genuine threats to our homeland security.’ He was as right then as he is wrong now…
“Building a wall at the border won't stop illegal migration. Donald Trump built 455 miles of border fencing, equipped with cameras and sensors, at a cost of $15 billion. It did not deter unauthorized migrants. In well-documented episodes, people used inexpensive ladders to scale the wall, climb over it, cut through it with power tools, saw through it, and build tunnels underneath it. Why would the Biden administration think that their additional section of the wall would be any different?”
Raul A. Reyes, Newsweek
“An estimated 95 percent of native habitat in the Rio Grande Valley has already been lost to development. Construction could threaten plans to recover populations of endangered ocelots, as well as endangered plants…
“In the notice, Mayorkas describes the Rio Grande Valley as an area of ‘high illegal entry,’ noting that there have been 245,000 apprehensions there in 2023. [A conservation advocate] told me that figure is ‘extremely misleading’ in the context of the filing, as it refers to apprehensions throughout the entirety of the 20 counties that comprise the Rio Grande Valley. The stretch where construction is slated to occur is ‘overwhelmingly peaceful and serene,’ he said.”
Kate Aronoff, New Republic
“Any serious efforts to reduce the number of migrants arriving on the southern border would have to also include cooperating with migrant-sending countries, as well as increasing resources for migrant processing that happens beyond the border…“One of the biggest sending countries right now is Venezuela, with which the US has no diplomatic relations, and which is essentially a failed state. According to figures obtained by CBS News, about 50,000 Venezuelans crossed the border in September…
“The Biden administration has made Venezuelans eligible for Temporary Protected Status, which will allow them to temporarily live and work in the US. But that won’t mitigate the factors behind their decision to leave their home country or other Latin American countries where they may have tried to build a life for themselves. Though diplomacy and executive action can alter the number of migrants arriving, there’s only so much the executive branch can do without new legislation, or even additional funding, from Congress. Neither appears to be forthcoming.”
Nicole Narea, Vox
