During his regular morning presser on Friday, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said he does not think that the new border wall will even be built, adding that the Biden administration doesn’t even want to build it.
According to the Washington Free Beacon, Lopez Obrador called the wall “pure publicity.” That presser followed a Thursday visit by a delegation from the U.S. State Department, which was led by Antony Blinken. Lopez Obrador commented that the administration does not even want to build the new sections of the wall. He added that during the meeting, the Mexican delegation said it does not believe the migration problem will be solved with a wall, saying, “We’ve always spoken about tending to the root causes.”
Lopez Obrador has a point. In another story, the Free Beacon said that on Thursday, Biden stated that the administration is legally obligated to go through with the construction since the money for the project had been appropriated during the Trump administration and could not be used for anything else. Biden stated:
The money was appropriated for the border wall. I tried to get them to redirect that money. They didn’t. They wouldn’t, and in the meantime, there’s nothing under the law other than they have to use the money for what it was appropriated. I can’t stop that.
This stands in stark contrast to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ statement earlier in the week in which he said there was “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.” Of course, that statement stands in stark contrast to one he made in 2021 that he did not agree with building a wall.
Never one to pass up an opportunity for a good old-fashioned tantrum, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) vented her spleen on Thursday, calling the planned construction a “cruel policy.”
— Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@RepAOC) October 5, 2023
I know that the congresswoman objects to the wall on principle, but she should reconsider. It is after Labor Day, and she needs someplace where she can wear that white dress for photo ops.
What we are seeing here is a classic example of this administration’s disorganization. It may be conjecture, but I suspect that when Biden’s people learned that the funding situation was non-negotiable, they needed a way to spin it, hence Mayorkas’ alarmist language. The administration may have thought that this was an opportunity to woo voters who are wary or angry about the president and his record, with the bonus of being able to tweak Trump by completing something he did not.
Then the wall would not be completed, and the blame would fall on Republican obstructionists. But someone, somewhere, realized that renewed construction would infuriate much of the base, although Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-N.Y.) may have privately gotten her hopes up. And so tactics were switched, gears were ground, and the message was reversed.
And no matter what, the wall will not be built.
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