When Vice President Kamala Harris said, “we have a secure border in that that is a priority for any nation, including ours and our administration,” maybe what she meant was that the Biden administration was quietly taking steps that the previous administration had wholeheartedly embraced, like filling in gaps in border fencing:
U.S. Customs and Border Protection confirmed that work on the border wall that began under Trump is revving back up under Biden. In an online presentation Wednesday, CBP — the largest division of the Department of Homeland Security and home to the Border Patrol — detailed plans to address environmental damage brought on by the former president’s signature campaign promise and confirmed that the wall will remain a permanent fixture of the Southwest for generations to come.
The resumed operations will range from repairing gates and roads to filling gaps in the wall that were left following the pause on construction that Biden initiated in January 2021. The wall’s environmental harms have been particularly acute in southern Arizona, where CBP used explosives to blast through large swaths of protected land — including sacred Native American burial grounds and one-of-a-kind wildlife habitats — in service of Trump’s most expansive border wall extensions.
Starting next month, contractors will return to the Sonoran Desert in Arizona to resume work on the wall, senior CBP officials said in a public webinar. In the months since Biden’s pause began, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas approved several so-called remediation projects related to the border wall. The first plan that CBP presented for public comment was in the Tucson sector, the Border Patrol’s largest area of operations and site of Trump’s most dramatic and controversial border wall construction.
It is fair to question whether the actions by DHS and CBP really count as “the Biden administration rev[ving] up work on completing Donald Trump’s signature project,” as the Intercept characterizes it. Filling in gaps does not quite align with Trump’s “big, beautiful wall” rhetoric from the campaign trail of 2016, or Trump’s 2020 contention that the wall was “almost finished.” A lot of the work during the Trump years was replacing old fencing that had holes or was falling down; as of January 2021, “only 80 miles of new barriers have been built where there were none before – that includes 47 miles of primary wall, and 33 miles of secondary wall built to reinforce the initial barrier.”
But the DHS decision also represents Biden backtracking again from his January 20, 2021, proclamation that “building a massive wall that spans the entire southern border is not a serious policy solution. It is a waste of money that diverts attention from genuine threats to our homeland security . . . It shall be the policy of my Administration that no more American taxpayer dollars be diverted to construct a border wall.”
Maybe it’s not such a waste of money after all, huh, Mr. President?