Recently, a large number of migrants have crossed the border from Mexico, which puts a lot of pressure on both border states and big cities like New York and Chicago. The Biden administration has now decided to make exceptions to 26 different laws, regulations and legal requirements in order to be able to extend the wall near the city of McAllen, Texas, as soon as possible.
“There is currently an urgent and immediate need to build physical barriers and roads near the US border to prevent illegal entry into the country,” writes US Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas in a press release on Thursday.
The announcement marks a major political reversal for Biden, who during his 2020 campaign vowed not to extend the wall in the slightest. When he took office in 2021, he also issued a presidential order calling the wall a “waste” and promising that “no more American taxpayer money will be used to build a border wall.”
Biden: Congress wouldn’t listen
The new wall construction is paid for with funds that the Trump administration set aside in 2019. President Biden stated on Thursday that he still does not believe that a wall solves the problems at the border.
– The money was set aside for the wall. I tried to get Congress to reallocate the money. They didn’t, he told reporters according to The New York Times.
SVT’s US correspondent Fouad Youcefi believes, however, that Biden could have waived further construction – if the situation had been different:
– This is rather proof of how much pressure the Biden administration is under because of the situation at the border. In recent weeks, Democrats in several major cities have begged Biden to do something about the record number of people entering the United States.