Biden border wall flip-flop won’t solve border crisis
Washington Examiner
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When President Joe Biden was campaigning in 2020 in front of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, he promised, “There will not be another foot of wall constructed in my administration.”
Now, as his border policies have led to month after month of record high levels of illegal border crossings, and Democratic mayors beg him to stop the flow of immigrants to their cities, Biden wants to build 20 miles of border wall in the Rio Grande Valley. That’s quite a flip-flop.
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But voters hoping for a dramatic improvement in Biden’s overall immigration strategy, however, should not get their hopes up too high. The president is doing only the bare minimum of border enforcement required by law while simultaneously undermining national sovereignty in every other way imaginable.
The border construction announcement came late at night and consisted of a single notice posted to the Federal Register identifying 26 laws the Biden administration will have to waive in order to begin construction. The money for the wall was appropriated by Congress before Biden was president in 2019, and that law required the money must be spent by the end of fiscal 2023, which occurred on Sept. 30. Even in trying to do the bare minimum, Biden is four days late of the law’s requirements.
In the notice announcing the waivers, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas admitted, “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 in the project areas.”
Thanks to current policies, more roads and border walls are undoubtedly needed to help bring a semblance of order back to the southern border. But until Biden’s other border policies are changed, building 20 miles of new barrier between isn’t going to solve anything.
The driving force behind the border crisis is Biden’s “catch and release” policy. Even with all the wall you want, and a million Border Patrol agents, too, the crisis will get worse if the policy is for law enforcement to take all the immigrants they catch and then release them into the U.S. to go wherever they want.
This should be obvious, and it is to more and more Democrats. In a moment of honesty, New York City Mayor Eric Adams aide Ingrid Lewis-Martin recently told reporters, “We need the federal government, the Congress members, the Senate, and the president to do its job: Close the borders.”
This is true. Biden needs to close the borders. But Lewis-Martin was quickly reprimanded by the mayor’s office for speaking the truth, and the mayor himself later corrected her, saying, “We believe the borders should remain open.”
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Adams went on to say, however, that while the border should be open to migrants, those who cross should be sent to any place other than New York City. “We have made it clear there should be a decompression strategy so that we could properly deal with the volume that is coming to our city,” Adams told reporters as he boarded a plane to Mexico for the sole purpose of telling migrants not to come to his city.
The Left’s hypocrisy over immigration would be funny if it wasn’t also creating so much misery. Record high numbers of migrants are dying while answering Biden’s call to “surge to the border.” And the flood is causing misery to communities all over America. The only way to end this crisis is for Biden to renounce his invitation for all to come. He should not just copy the last administration by building the wall but also by reinstating the “Remain in Mexico” program.