Representative image of Mexican refugees at the US border.
Credit: International New York Times
President Joe Biden campaigned vociferously against a wall along the US-Mexico border, which his predecessor had championed as a key deterrent to unlawful crossings. A wall, Biden said, was “not a serious policy solution.”
But facing a surge of migrants this year and sharp criticism even from some political allies, the Biden administration has backed away from its hard line on expanding the wall. The administration filed notice Thursday that it was waiving more than 20 federal laws and regulations, including environmental ones, to build additional barriers along the southern border.
With the shift, Biden finds himself helping to build a border wall that was one of the signature objectives of the Trump administration, even as he maintains that such barriers are ineffective in curbing unlawful entry from Mexico.
It is one of the starkest signs yet of the challenges Biden and his administration are wrestling with, as humanitarian crises across the world drive more migrants to the US border while a deeply divided Congress leaves in place an outdated, dysfunctional immigration system.
News that the wall would be expanded broke as three members of Biden’s cabinet were traveling to Mexico for meetings with the country’s president on a host of issues, including migration and border security.
One of the officials, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, said that easing the laws was necessary to expedite construction of sections of a border wall in south Texas, where thousands of migrants have been crossing the Rio Grande daily to reach US soil.
“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 said in a notice published in the Federal Register on Thursday, adding that waiving laws and other requirements was necessary to complete the work more quickly in Starr County, Texas.
The U.S. Border Patrol in the Rio Grande Valley had encountered more than 245,000 migrants who had entered the country between ports of entry, or unlawfully, in the 2023 fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, the notice said.
It added that construction would be built with funds appropriated by Congress in 2019 for wall construction in the Rio Grande Valley. That appropriation followed a disaster declaration by the Trump administration amid soaring numbers of border crossers.
Biden said Thursday that he had no choice but to use the money for the wall.
“The money was appropriated for the border wall. I tried to get them to reappropriate, to redirect that money. They didn’t. They wouldn’t,” he told reporters, apparently referring to Congress.
Asked whether he thought the border wall was effective, he replied, “no.”
In January 2021, on Biden’s first day in office, the administration revoked the disaster declaration and halted construction. In a proclamation, he said that “Building a massive wall that spans the entire southern border is not a serious policy solution.”
In the notice Thursday, Mayorkas said the decision to resume construction was consistent with the purpose of the appropriated funds.
Nearly $200 million of the $1.375 billion Congress designated for barriers in the Rio Grande Valley was still available, and the money had to be used by the end of the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, according to the law.
As the number of migrants entering the United States has soared in recent months, Biden has come under fire from Republican leaders, who have made immigration a core issue in the presidential race, and he has faced increasing pressure from mayors of some Democratic-led cities.
More than 2 million migrant entries were recorded in each of the last two years, creating periodic scenes of chaos in border towns. The arrivals also have overwhelmed social service providers in New York, Chicago and other cities where many have sought to restart their lives.
At a news conference Thursday morning, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who is meeting with US officials in his country, said the resumption of wall construction was “contrary” to what Biden had been arguing.
“I understand there are strong pressures from political groups from the extreme right in the United States,” he said, “especially those who want to take advantage of the migratory phenomenon, the consumption of drugs, for electoral purposes.”
Starr County, where the 20 miles of wall is to go up, is home to about 66,000 people west of the city of McAllen.
The Biden administration has previously taken small steps to seal portions of high-traffic areas along the border. Last year, it closed gaps in the bollard fence erected by the Trump administration in Yuma, Arizona, which had become a busy crossing point for migrants who surrendered to border agents and claimed asylum.
Trump erected some 550 miles of the hulking, rust-colored bollard fence along the border, much of it to replace shorter, older barriers. Still, smugglers have successfully loosened beams to dig holes or have flung rope-ladders over the structure, which has enabled many migrants to breach the border.
Starr County is home to the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge, which follows the Rio Grande along the river’s last 275-mile stretch. The Clean Air Act and Safe Drinking Water and Endangered Species Act are among the federal laws that the Homeland Security Department will waive to allow construction to proceed.