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President Joe Biden will build more miles of border wall in south Texas after calling the barriers a “waste of money” and “not a serious policy solution” under former President Donald Trump.
This week, Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced the construction of about 20 miles of border wall in Starr County, Texas, which sits across from Tamaulipas, Mexico.
“The United States Border Patrol’s Rio Grande Valley Sector is an area of ‘high illegal entry,’” DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas wrote in a federal notice:
As of early August 2023, Border Patrol had encountered over 245,000 such entrants attempting to enter the United States between ports of entry in the Rio Grande Valley Sector in Fiscal Year 2023. [Emphasis added]
Therefore, I must use my authority under section 102 of [Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996] to install additional physical barriers and roads in the Rio Grande Valley Sector. [Emphasis added]
Watch: 2,000 Migrants Cross into Texas Border by Early Afternoon, At Least 1,500 More Expected
Mayorkas said the agency will use funding allocated by Congress in 2019 to construct the new border wall in Starr County.
Construction will occur even after Biden used border wall construction as a central tenant of his 2020 presidential campaign — vowing that “not … another foot of wall” would be built by his administration.
Likewise, immediately after taking office, Biden signed an executive order that halted all construction of border wall, declaring it a “waste of money” and “not a serious policy solution” to illegal immigration.
“It is a waste of money that diverts attention from genuine threats to our homeland security,” Biden wrote in the order fewer than three years ago. “… it shall be the policy of my administration that no more American taxpayer dollars be diverted to construct a border wall.”
During Trump’s time in the White House, his administration built about 370 miles of border wall — 80 miles of which were built in places along the border where no prior barrier existed. The remaining 290 miles of border wall were built to replace old barriers.
The overwhelming majority of the nearly 2,000-mile-long southern border, more than 60 percent, has no physical barriers separating the U.S. from Mexico.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
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