Biden Says Walls Don’t Work as US Reverses Course on Trump’s Border Wall

President Joe Biden defended his administration’s surprise decision to allow for a section of the Trump border wall to be completed on Thursday, saying it proved impossible to divert the money for other projects.

"The money was appropriated for the border wall. I tried to get them to reappropriate, to redirect the money. They didn’t, they wouldn't," Biden told reporters in Washington, referring to Congress. "In the meantime, there’s nothing under the law other than they have to use the money for what it was appropriated for. I can't stop that," the president said.

Asked if he viewed the border wall as an effective tool to fight illegal immigration, Biden answered bluntly: "No."

Biden’s comments followed an announcement by his Department of Homeland Security earlier in the day that it would approve construction of additional border wall fencing on the border between Texas and Mexico amid the spiraling immigration crisis.

The new section of fencing will be built in Texas' Starr County, along a route Customs and Border Patrol says is seeing particularly "high illegal entry," with up to 245,000 illegal immigrants estimated to have made their way through this section of the border over the past year alone.

"There is presently 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," Biden DHS chief Alejandro Mayorkas said in a statement.

The new section of wall is expected to run about 32 km.

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White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was at a loss for words trying to explain the administration’s flip-flop on the wall, telling reporters that the funds were appropriated in 2019 by Republicans, and that the administration is now simply making good on its legal obligations to spend the money.

"We believe that there are better effective ways of moving forward to secure our border and security – our border security. We have continuously asked the Congress to act to provide our CBP, law enforcement, law enforcement at the border – to give the resources they need to do their jobs. And so we’re going to continue to call on Congress. We believe, and the president has been very clear even when you asked him does a border wall work, he said ‘no’. And he has been very consistent about that. We believe that we need border technology that is modernized at land ports of entry, and that’s what we want to see," Jean-Pierre said.

Former President Donald Trump, who made the construction of a wall on the border with Mexico with a "big, fat, beautiful door" for legal entry a central plank of his campaign in 2016, and who managed to build new barriers along 732 km of the border during his presidency, demanded an apology from Biden.

"As I have stated often, over thousands of years, there are only two things that have consistently worked, wheels, and walls!” Trump wrote in a social media post. “Will Joe Biden apologize to me and America for taking so long to get moving, and allowing our country to be flooded with 15 million illegal immigrants, from places unknown?" he asked. "I will await his apology!" Trump added.

The border wall was one of nearly a dozen hardline Trump-era immigration directives which the Biden administration nixed in its first weeks of office, giving rise to what has become the largest immigration crisis in US history.

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DHS data published last week showed migrant apprehensions along the southern border had surpassed 2 million people in fiscal year 2023, which ended on September 31. The figures came close to matching the historic high of 2.2 million apprehensions in 2022.

Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy carried out an independent investigation on the nature of the border crisis this past summer, concluding that immigration policy in America is effectively being "administered by the cartels, not our government," and revealing that the majority of migrants coming into the country illegally through the border with Mexico today are arriving from far-off nations like Peru, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Bangladesh, India, China and Nepal, not Mexico or Central America. Once in the country, Kennedy said, illegal immigrants are often forced to spend years paying off hefty debts to cartels for helping them across, with disappearances, rapes and other crimes widespread, and undocumented persons unable to turn to the authorities for help.

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Biden Insists Walls Don't Work as DHS Reverses Course on Trump's Border Barrier