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“Not another foot.”
Those have been the phrases Joe Biden used as a mantra all through his 2020 presidential marketing campaign concerning the construction of the U.S.-Mexico border wall. But on Thursday, the Biden administration authorised a plan to finish a piece of the border wall near Yuma, Arizona.
The plan contains filling 4 main gaps within the wall that proceed to permit the Yuma space to be one of the busiest corridors for unlawful immigration crossings.
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas licensed the brand new plan, which was began by the Trump administration, in an effort to “deploy modern, effective border measures” and enhance “safety and security along the Southwest Border,” the company stated.
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Migrant households from Brazil passing by a niche within the border wall after crossing from Mexico to Yuma, Arizona.
(AP Photo/Eugene Garcia, File)
The undertaking will likely be funded below Homeland Security’s 2021 finances, although it was initially deliberate to be funded by the Defense Department.
Yuma’s border sector stays an unsolved problem for the Biden administration as border patrol brokers have already stopped migrants greater than 160,000 occasions from January by June within the sector this yr.
The determine is sort of quadruple the quantity of migrant stops from final yr and the Yuma sector stays the busiest migrant sector within the state of Arizona.
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Del Rio and Rio Grande Valley in South Texas have been the one different sectors with extra site visitors alongside all the U.S.-Mexico border.
The Yuma sector was notably busy below former President Trump, who had parts of the border wall constructed or bolstered. There was additionally a plaque put in alongside the Yuma border in 2020, affirming Trump’s position in securing the wall.
Biden’s determination to safe the border wall comes after Sen. Mark Kelly, D-AZ, has referred to as on the president to safe the border. Republican lawmakers have made related calls.
The Biden administration’s quiet approval of the wall’s construction additionally comes after Biden typically used it as a method of contrasting his insurance policies with these of the Trump administration.
In the previous, Biden was repeatedly vital of Trump, his border wall, and his immigration insurance policies — which he known as “xenophobic” and “racist.”
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In an op-ed printed within the Miami Herald, Biden particularly wrote that the slogan “build the wall” was “divorced from reality” and a wall “won’t stop the flow of illegal narcotics or human trafficking, both of which come primarily through legal ports of entry.”
“Nor will it stem the numbers of undocumented, most of whom over-stay legal visas,” he added.
During an interview in August 2020, Biden advised NPR’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro: “There will not be another foot of wall constructed on my administration, No. 1.”
“I’m going to make sure that we have border protection, but it’s going to be based on making sure that we use high-tech capacity to deal with it. And at the ports of entry — that’s where all the bad stuff is happening,” he added.
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Biden additionally ceased all new border wall construction after he took workplace and has advised Congress to cancel funding for border wall construction.
He has since ramped up border security measures. Biden additionally continues to make use of billions of {dollars} Congress appropriated for the wall’s construction. He can’t legally refuse to take action — he’s solely permitted to pause border construction tasks.
A spot within the border wall between the U.S. and Mexico is seen from farmland in Yuma, Arizona on June 1, 2022.
(PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP through Getty Images)
Republicans have repeatedly sued Biden for pausing the border wall construction.
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“The Biden administration’s flat refusal to use funds that have already been set aside by Congress to build the border wall is not only illegal and unconstitutional. It’s also wrong,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton stated in a lawsuit filed October 2021.
In January, Biden introduced a pause on establishing roughly 86 miles of a border wall alongside the Rio Grande citing an environmental evaluate.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
