Joe Biden Quietly Builds the Wall

I t sometimes seems that journalists are determined to invert cause and effect when reporting on events that frustrate or inconvenience Democratic politicians. NBC News provided its readers with a crystalline example of this phenomenon on Wednesday when it reported on the increased attention lawmakers are devoting to the deteriorating situation at the southern border “as ‘crisis’ rhetoric spreads.”

This gets things exactly backwards. Heated political rhetoric is not responsible for creating the impression in gullible American minds that the border is a disaster; the empirical crisis at the border has convinced dispassionate observers to call it a crisis. Indeed, conditions are so acutely calamitous that the Biden administration has been compelled to break the emergency glass around an option that the president and his running mate emphatically rejected during the 2020 campaign. Much to its chagrin, the Biden administration is building the wall.

“The Secretary of Homeland Security has determined, pursuant to law, 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,” read the public notice produced by DHS secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’s office this week. The plan is to build at least 20 miles of new border barriers along the Rio Grande — an area Congress, in 2019, designated as a vital crossing point and appropriated $1.38 billion for the construction of a border wall to close.

The Biden White House is waiving no fewer than 26 federal laws — including the Clean Air Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act, among others — to construct the additional miles of wall with all due alacrity. Given the administration’s sensitivity to criticism from its left flank, this is not an initiative this White House would pursue if it had a choice. Moreover, the administration’s decision opens it up to the charge of hypocrisy, given the president’s categorical denunciation of the very concept of a border wall.

“It’s imperative that we secure our borders, but ‘build the wall’ is a slogan divorced from reality,” Biden wrote in a 2019 op-ed condemning the Trump White House’s “racist” policies toward the “Latinx” population. Building the wall, he wrote, was a waste of time and money. It would not “stop asylum seekers fleeing” north, nor would it reduce the undocumented population, “most of whom overstay legal visas.”

Biden doubled down on his opposition to the construction of new border barriers once he had secured the Democratic presidential nomination. “There will not be another foot of wall constructed in my administration,” the future president said in an August 2020 interview with then-NPR reporter Lulu Garcia-Navarro. “What about the land confiscations?” Garcia-Navarro asked. Biden responded indignantly. “End. End. End. Stop. Done. Over. Not going to do it,” he insisted. “Withdraw the lawsuits. We’re out. We’re not going to confiscate the land.”

Biden’s vice president was no less unequivocal in her rejection of a border wall as a remedy to rampant border crossing. Kamala Harris said that Trump’s wall was little more than a “medieval vanity project,” and “a complete waste of taxpayer money [that] won’t make us any safer.” Biden’s fellow Democrats were just as unequivocal. Nancy Pelosi called the project “an immorality” that was likely an expression of Trump’s monomaniacal animus toward Hispanics. “Anyone who supports this is supporting racism,” Transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg replied when asked in a 2019 Democratic debate if Trump supporters who chanted “build a wall” are motivated by hatred. Congressman Adam Smith called the wall a physical manifestation of Trump’s “xenophobia and racism.” And so on.

Do all these condemnations of Trump’s signature infrastructure project and the motivations that produced it not apply to Joe Biden? Presumably, the president’s allies would say no. After all, Democrats have had years to attack Biden for abandoning his opposition to border barriers. While Biden put a stop to construction of any new barriers along the southern border on his first day in office, his administration did nonetheless seek congressional funding for the modernization of existing barriers and construction to fill in what Mayorkas called “some gaps in the wall.”

A handful of Democratic lawmakers and their allies in the press refused to judge Biden by a double standard. Representative Ilhan Omar denounced Biden’s “construction of Trump’s xenophobic and racist wall,” while prominent media outlets decried the continuation of Trump’s “xenophobic iteration of a border enforcement strategy begun about 30 years ago.” In fact, as recently as last month, Biden’s own Government Accountability Office warned that border-wall development had “caused significant damage and destruction” to the local environment and Native American cultural sites. It is a testament to the absolute urgency of the crisis at the border that the Biden White House has subordinated these powerful political incentives to the necessity of reducing the influx of migrants crossing into U.S. territory by every available means.

Surely some of the Democratic Party’s more devoted ideologues will continue to object to the border wall’s construction, but the demands of partisan politics will now force most of the party’s stalwarts to retroactively ratify Trump’s instincts when it comes to border enforcement. The Biden administration’s actions have put the lie to the notion that physical countermeasures at the border are both useless and racist. It turns out that it wasn’t “build the wall” but the opportunistic attacks on the motives of Americans who concern themselves with the integrity of America’s borders that were “divorced from reality.”