JOE BIDEN PLEDGED ‘NOT ANOTHER FOOT’ OF BORDER WALL. NOW HE’S BUILDING IT. It’s rare for what is known in the federal bureaucracy as a “notice of determination” to make news. But this week, the Department of Homeland Security issued what might be called a quiet bombshell with such a notice. “The Secretary of Homeland Security has determined,” it announced, “that it is necessary to waive certain laws, regulations, and other legal requirements in order to ensure the expeditious construction of barriers and roads in the vicinity of the international land border in Starr County Texas.”
The short version of that is: President Joe Biden is going to build more of former President Donald Trump’s border wall. It is a complete reversal of Biden’s campaign promises in 2020. It is also, after three disastrous years of mass border incursions by illegal crossers, a step down from the moral high horse Biden has ridden on this for three years.
Go back to 2020. In August of that year, running against Trump, Biden vowed: “There will not be another foot of wall constructed on my administration. I’m going to make sure that we have border protection, but it’s going to be based on making sure that we use high-tech capacity to deal with it. And at the ports of entry — that’s where all the bad stuff is happening.”
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It’s hard to exaggerate how wrong-headed Biden’s position was. First, a physical barrier — a fence or a wall — stops, or at least significantly slows, illegal border crossers. Second, many high-tech measures have proven both expensive and ineffective. And third, Biden’s policies made sure that lots of “bad stuff,” that is millions of illegal crossings, took place away from the ports of entry. Biden screwed everything up.
And he screwed up with a sense of great moral righteousness. “If I’m elected president, we’re going to immediately end Trump’s assault on the dignity of immigrant communities,” Biden said in September 2020. “We’re going to restore our moral standing in the world and our historic role as a safe haven for refugees and asylum-seekers.”
When he entered office, Biden essentially opened the border and offered would-be illegal crossers the greatest possible incentive: If you cross into the United States, you will be allowed to stay. Millions poured across. It’s hard to know exactly how many, but so far in Biden’s presidency, the number is at least 7 million, perhaps more than that. Small towns in Texas, in the hard-hit Rio Grande Valley Sector, were overrun.
While much of this was happening, many national news outlets barely took notice. (Fox News was a notable exception.) That let the Biden White House mostly ignore the problem. Top administration officials made statements like “the border is secure,” which, given the circumstances, had to be a knowing lie.
Then something happened that changed the entire political equation. Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) sent a few busloads of immigrants to New York City. (The immigrants had willingly accepted the offer of transportation.) All of a sudden, officials in the nation’s largest and richest “sanctuary city” began howling. This is a terrible burden! We can’t support this! Go back to where you came from! Mayor Eric Adams reached a breaking point when he declared last month, “This issue will destroy New York City.”
Meanwhile, on the border, the situation, unthinkably, is getting even worse. “A record-setting number of migrants crossed the southern border into the United States in September, with over 260,000 encounters reported by Customs and Border Protection in the last 30 days,” reported the New York Post. “The stunning figure — which is roughly the population of St. Petersburg, Florida — is the highest monthly total ever reported by border officials as the country grapples with the migrant crisis, CBP sources tell Fox News.”
Now, guess what? Biden is seeking regulatory permission to restart construction of Trump’s border wall. The administration’s “notice of determination” says this: “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.”
Well, how about that! Who would have thought? Of course, the action is too little and years too late. And do not take it too seriously: At the same time Biden is seeking to restart some wall construction, he’s also working on ways to keep up the flow of inadmissible aliens into the country by other means, such as the app he has been promoting for quick and easy entry into the U.S. by people who do not qualify for asylum. So do not be too impressed.
A presidential campaign is underway. Might that be a factor in this? Of course it is. What Biden is hoping to do with this action is to satisfy those Democrats who have become troubled by the border disaster. They will ignore the massive hypocrisy of Biden restarting Trump’s wall if they can say that something is being done about the problem.
From the Republican side, one thing is certain: Trump will savage Biden for this, and Biden will deserve every bit of the savaging. If any other Republican, such as Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, or anyone else, becomes the GOP nominee, they, too, will attack Biden relentlessly, and Biden will deserve every attack.
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