Biden is constructing a brand new border wall amid rising migrant crossings

The Biden administration has approved the development of a brand new part of border wall in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley. It’s a reversal of President Joe Biden’s marketing campaign promise that “not one other foot” of border wall can be constructed below his purview that comes because the president faces rising strain from Republicans — and members of his personal get together — to scale back rising border crossings.

Division of Homeland Safety Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas mentioned in a discover within the Federal Register that there’s “presently an acute and quick want” to construct the brand new border wall to stop unauthorized border crossings. He waived dozens of federal legal guidelines in approving the plans to assemble the wall, together with the Nationwide Environmental Coverage Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Clear Water Act, and the Clear Air Act.

The Rio Grande Valley sector of the border alone has seen practically 300,000 migrant encounters between October 2022 and August of this 12 months, in response to information from US Customs and Border Safety. Apprehensions of migrants are additionally excessive throughout the border, with these numbers reaching a peak for this 12 months at greater than 200,000 in September.

Biden argues that he had no selection in whether or not the border wall undertaking moved ahead. Within the Oval Workplace Thursday, he famous that the cash that will likely be used to assemble the wall was appropriated in 2019 below the Trump administration and claimed that it should be used for that objective.

“I attempted to get them to reappropriate it, to redirect that cash,” he mentioned. “They didn’t. They wouldn’t.”

Nonetheless, it’s onerous to see how the undertaking isn’t politically expedient for him when he’s dealing with strain from each events to deliver the variety of border crossings down.

Republicans are reiterating requires Mayorkas’s impeachment, claiming he’s been ineffective. Former President Donald Trump — the 2024 Republican frontrunner whose calls to “construct the wall” throughout your entire southern border had been a defining characteristic of his 2016 marketing campaign — mentioned he was awaiting an “apology” from Biden over his previous criticisms of the border wall: “As I’ve acknowledged typically, over hundreds of years, there are solely two issues which have constantly labored, wheels, and partitions!” he wrote Thursday in a put up on TruthSocial.

Democratic leaders throughout the US have additionally pressed the Biden administration for options.

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson lately demanded that the White Home take quick motion to handle migrant arrivals they are saying their cities are struggling to assist. New York Metropolis Mayor Eric Adams even went to Mexico for a public data marketing campaign warning migrants that his metropolis doesn’t have the assets to accommodate further arrivals.

That’s to not say the administration’s resolution lacks critics. A number of Democratic lawmakers decried the plan, together with Texas Rep. Henry Cuellar, who known as it “wasteful,” and mentioned, “A border wall is a 14th-century answer to a Twenty first-century drawback. It won’t bolster border safety.”

And for immigrant advocates, shifting forward with the border wall undertaking marks a failure of the Biden administration’s insurance policies.

“The Biden administration is doubling down on the failed insurance policies of the previous which have confirmed wasteful and ineffective,” Jonathan Blazer, director of border methods on the American Civil Liberties Union, mentioned in an announcement. “This politically motivated motion will solely hurt border communities.”

Biden’s wall is a return to pre-Trump immigration coverage

Trump got down to assemble a wall throughout your entire southern border — an enterprise that many immigration consultants denounced on the time as a drain on assets that might not be efficient in attaining the previous president’s acknowledged intention of preserving migrants out. By the point he left workplace, solely 52 miles of wall had been constructed the place there had not been a barrier earlier than. Migrant apprehensions however rose below Trump, falling through the pandemic solely to leap again up once more by the spring of 2021.

The Biden administration isn’t precisely getting down to end the job that Trump began. When requested Thursday within the Oval Workplace whether or not he thought the present border wall is efficient, Biden himself mentioned “no.” However this border wall undertaking is way more restricted and according to what US immigration authorities have finished for many years in being “cautious in deciding the place limitations would make sense,” mentioned Doris Meissner, former commissioner of the then-Immigration and Naturalization Service. However she additionally mentioned that such limitations can solely “complement or complement different enforcement measures.”

“They’re not a single answer,” she added.

Any critical efforts to scale back the variety of migrants arriving on the southern border must additionally embody cooperating with migrant-sending international locations, in addition to rising assets for migrant processing that occurs past the border, Meissner mentioned.

Problematically for the Biden administration, one of many greatest sending international locations proper now could be Venezuela, with which the US has no diplomatic relations, and which is actually a failed state. In line with figures obtained by CBS Information, about 50,000 Venezuelans crossed the border in September — a document quantity reflective of the gradual financial rebound from the pandemic in Latin American international locations neighboring Venezuela the place many migrants tried to settle.

The Biden administration has made Venezuelans eligible for Short-term Protected Standing, which is able to enable them to briefly dwell and work within the US. However that received’t mitigate the elements behind their resolution to depart their house nation or different Latin American international locations the place they could have tried to construct a life for themselves.

Although diplomacy and government motion can alter the variety of migrants arriving, there’s solely a lot the manager department can do with out new laws, and even further funding, from Congress. Neither seems to be forthcoming.

There was little likelihood of any laws passing within the divided Congress even earlier than the latest implosion of the Home over spending payments. And furthermore, Home Republicans blocked the White Home’s $4 billion supplemental funding request that would come with assist for border enforcement, migrant companies, and the hiring of latest immigration judges tasked with adjudicating asylum claims. These judges are presently dealing with a backlog of greater than 2 million circumstances throughout the US.