Biden's Border Wall Gambit Proves That He Can Do a Lot More to Control the Border

AP Photo/Christian Chavez

On Aug. 20, 2020, Joe Biden told an NPR interviewer that “not one more foot of wall would be built” if he became president. Today, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said that there was an “acute and immediate need” to waive dozens of environmental laws at the border to restart construction on the border wall begun by Biden’s predecessor.

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The crisis that Biden refuses to call a crisis is once again forcing the president to adopt the tactics and the ideas of Donald Trump, whose methods in drastically reducing border incursions Biden and the Democrats bitterly denounced.

“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 pursuant to sections 102(a) and 102(b) of IIRIRA (Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996),” Mayorkas said.

This isn’t the first time that Biden has adopted a strategy that Donald Trump first used to control the border after denouncing it as “racist” or “inhumane.” Biden hammered Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” before the election, but he maintained it until the Supreme Court made Biden end it in 2022.

The president adopted a Trump-era policy that denied asylum seekers entry into the United States unless they were first denied safe harbor by another country, like Mexico.

“For the Biden administration to resurrect that horrific policy would be playing into Stephen Miller’s hands,” said Eleanor Acer, the director for refugee protection at Human Rights First. “It’s almost like Stephen Miller is still in the White House trying to block from asylum people seeking protection from persecution.”

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Miller is the left’s “Great Satan” of immigration. We haven’t heard much yet about how “cruel” and “inhumane” Biden’s policy is.

The long and short of it is that Biden’s policies are “Trump-lite” policies without the added protection of the pandemic measure, Title 42. And it’s been an absolute disaster.

In 2021, Biden canceled the state of emergency at the Southern border that Trump had declared. Trump used his emergency powers to divert money to build the wall and take other steps to keep illegal aliens from crossing the border.

But Biden has refused to declare a state of emergency, despite several million people crossing the border during his administration. Biden knows that if he declared an emergency, Republicans would be all over him — quite rightly — asking him why he didn’t declare it earlier.

From the beginning, Biden has tried to ignore or downplay the massive numbers of people entering the U.S. He has ignored the pleas of some of the most powerful Democrats in the country — big city mayors like Eric Adams in New York and Brandon Johnson in Chicago — for assistance in dealing with the immigration crisis in their “sanctuary cities.”

Fox News:

“Gee, maybe they shouldn’t have sold all the border wall parts,” [Trending Politics co-owner Collin] Rugg said, while also asking what the country would look like had the administration announced this earlier.

“How times have changed,” Tesla CEO Elon Musk wrote on X, the social media site he owns.

“Where isn’t the left accusing the Biden admin of racism and fascism for wanting a border wall?” conservative influencer duo the Hodgetwins wrote.

“Joe Biden unleashed chaos at our border for 3 years,” William Martin, the communications director for Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio., wrote. “Now that [Biden’s] staring down a massive loss to [Trump] in 2024 he thinks he can change his tune. It’s disgusting – but it won’t work. Joe Biden has zero credibility when it comes to securing the border.”

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The question that needs to be asked is whether there will still be outrage among voters about Biden’s nauseating hypocrisy in trying to close the border’s barn doors after the horses have fled.

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