Joe Biden confirmed on Thursday that he is legally obligated to continue building the border wall with Mexico, a major measure taken by his predecessor Donald Trump and which the current US president has long strongly criticized.
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The 80-year-old Democrat, who is running for re-election, said he “couldn’t cut” the funding pledged by the Republican billionaire, because he could not convince Congress to use the money for other measures.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced earlier that a new section would be created in the Rio Grande Valley, an area that witnesses a “large number of illegal entries” on the border between the two countries.
“There is an actuellement of a good and important construction of barrières physiques and des routes à proximité de la frontière des États-Unis afin d’empêcher des entrées illégales,” said M. Mayorkas in an official office published by the federal registry. s United State.
This information was described as a radical change, as Joe Biden said on the day he took office in January 2021, that taxpayers would no longer pay for the construction of a border wall, and that the “huge” wall was not a “serious risk.” The political solution.”
In Mexico, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador immediately saw this as a “step backwards.”
Strong protests
“The money was for the border wall. I tried to get (Congressional Republicans) to allocate the money to something else, to redirect it. They didn’t want it,” Joe Biden defended.
He continued: “In the meantime, it is not legally possible to use this money for anything other than what it was intended for,” stressing at the same time that “no,” he does not believe that building walls is a solution to the migration crisis.
“We are enforcing the law,” spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre repeated several times during her daily news conference, also emphasizing that Congress had blocked any attempt to use these funds otherwise.
White House spokesman Andrew Bates said on X, formerly known as Twitter, that calling it a reversal was “completely false.” “Congress requires us to do this under the 2019 law.”
Donald Trump, Joe Biden’s rival and the right’s favorite in the upcoming presidential elections, did not hesitate to respond.
The Biden administration’s announcement shows that “I was right to build 900 kilometers (…) of a beautiful new border wall,” he wrote on his platform, Truth Social.
The Secretary of Homeland Security had specified in the official notice that funds for “additional physical barriers” would come from an appropriation approved by Congress for this specific purpose in 2019, when Donald Trump was in power.
He also noted that about twenty federal laws, such as legislation related to the environment and protected species, would have to be suspended to allow the construction of this new part.
“Frustration”
Illegal immigration represents a growing political problem for Biden, who is running for re-election in 2024 and is controlled by Republicans who accuse him of inaction.
Recently, the federal administration almost experienced a “shutdown” (paralysis of its services) due to disagreements between the two camps: the right wing of the Republican Party is in fact opposed to releasing additional funds to Ukraine in the war that Russia invaded. Believing that this money should instead be used to fight the migration crisis.
However, the White House has refused to use wall construction to compromise conservative support for a new package earmarked for Ukraine. “I’m not going to connect the two,” Karine Jean-Pierre said Thursday.
The announcement of the new construction also disappointed environmental activists.
Laiken Jordahl of the Center for Biological Diversity called it “demoralizing,” lamenting that the president is “ignoring our environmental protection laws to build ineffective border walls that kill wildlife.”
