On his first day as president, Joe Biden said that building a wall wasn’t “a serious policy solution.” Just six weeks ago, the government was selling off materials for wall-building that had been canceled by this administration. But today, the White House is singing a different tune.
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced that the administration was going to waive dozens of federal laws, such as the Clean Air Act and Endangered Species Act, that prevent the government from building a wall at the Rio Grande, citing 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.”
This project inspired screaming headlines. But dig down a little deeper, and the joke becomes obvious. The Biden White House plans to build only 20 miles of wall.
The White House remains an enemy of good order at the border. The real record of the Biden White House is one of facilitating millions of illegal entries into the United States; 3.8 million have entered the U.S. since he took office. About half that number are completely off the radar.
The White House ended the suite of policies, including Remain in Mexico, that had stopped the flow of migrants to the border. The White House has released more than a million migrants into the country with nothing more than an order to appear at court to have their asylum status adjudicated in just the year that runs from last October 1 to this past September 30. This administration has extended temporary protected status to an unprecedented number of migrants and even now is giving completely novel five-year work permits to nearly three-quarters of a million Venezuelan migrants. There are over 1,454,000 known “gotaways” reported by the Border Patrol between the time Biden took office and April of this year. The number of known gotaways for 2023 is on pace to be over 1 million. There are 2.7 million backlog cases in our immigration courts, which are totally overwhelmed.
With this short bit of wall-building, the White House is proving only that it can read the recent polls. A survey from Marquette University showed that voters thought Donald Trump would handle border security better by a margin of 24 points, 52–28. These 20 miles of border wall are being built as a veil to drape over voters’ eyes ahead of an election year.
Twenty miles is less than 5 percent of the amount of wall that the Trump administration built during its time in office. And those 450 miles were not nearly enough of a deterrent on their own to stop the flow of migrants and drugs over the southern border. Nobody is going to be stopped or deterred from making an illegal journey into the United States by a small increment of additional wall, not when the Biden administration continues to abuse the law to facilitate millions of illegal entries, and not when he continues to give migrants more incentives — work permits, protection orders, or extended temporary status — that induce them to come and establish lives here in the legal gray zone the White House has created for them.
When it comes to his own building project at the border, what Biden said about Trump’s wall certainly applies — it’s not a serious policy solution.