A New Mexico rancher said that the Biden administration’s halt on the construction of the border wall is “a politically driven agenda” that is “hurting the American people.”
“We were really excited that [the border wall] was happening,” fourth-generation rancher Russell Johnson told Fox News on Monday of the border wall’s construction last April. “And then, as soon as President Biden took office, he pulled the plug on this project, and it came to an immediate halt.”
“The wall works. This is all a politically driven agenda. … And this is what’s frustrating to me is the Biden administration, they’re stopping the wall, in my opinion, to try to hurt Trump’s legacy of securing the border when, in reality, all it is doing is hurting the American people,” he said.
Johnson spoke exclusively with the Washington Examiner earlier this month and said that the border wall being halted has left a hole in the fence on his property, which could be used by migrants to cross into his backyard.
“There was 500 people crossing that a day, and then, in 2006, that went up to over 1,000 people a day,” Johnson said of migrants coming into the country in 2005. “It was nothing to see people just walking down the road. I mean, there was so many people crossing, and Border Patrol was so overwhelmed, that they couldn’t catch them all.”
In his interview with Fox News, he added that his neighbors were also in favor of the wall “because they’ve seen where it is worked, and that it does work.”
Former President Donald Trump made building the wall a cornerstone of his 2016 campaign, and he constructed more than 450 miles of the border during his tenure.
Biden, however, ordered “an immediate pause” on the construction of the wall on his first day in office.
“The proclamation directs an immediate pause in wall construction projects to allow a close review of the legality of the funding and contracting methods used, and to determine the best way to redirect funds that were diverted by the prior Administration to fund wall construction,” the White House executive order read.
