Donald Trump has pummeled the Joe Biden administration over the ongoing crisis on the US-Mexico border that the current occupant of the White House has failed to get under control.
The only reason the Democratic POTUS was suddenly ready to embrace the border wall project - and idea from the Trump era - was because of the relentless surge of illegal migrants, said the former president in a US media interview.
“Biden sees our country is being invaded... What is he going to do about the 15 million people from prisons, from mental institutions, insane asylums, and terrorists that have already come into our country?.. What has happened to our country?” the 45th POTUS fumed, as he called upon the Biden administration to "go back to Trump policies".
Trump's signature border wall construction had been brought to a screeching halt on 20 January 2021, when Joe Biden ordered a pause on all wall-related efforts at the southern US border.
The commanding frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination seized upon the recent remarks by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who said that "high illegal entry" required urgently waiving dozens of federal laws to allow for the construction of a border wall in south Texas. As more than 245,000 migrant encounters have been recorded in the Rio Grande Valley Sector this year, Trump slammed his successor for having reversed many of his policies and thus caused the crisis at the southern border.
"He has to reinstate Remain in Mexico and Title 42… He has to do all of the other things that we were doing," said Donald Trump.
A Trump campaign spokesman was quick to endorse his leader: "President Trump is always right. That’s why he built close to 500 miles of a powerful new wall on the border and it would have been finished by now… Instead, crooked Joe Biden turned our country into one giant sanctuary for dangerous criminal aliens."
Earlier, Mayorkas said that he would use his authority to waive 26 federal laws, including the Clean Air Act, Safe Drinking Water Act and Endangered Species Act, to allow for construction in Starr County in the Rio Grande Valley (RGV) sector. An announcement about this was posted on Wednesday on the US Federal Register by the Department of Homeland Security.
"There is presently an acute and immediate need to construct physical barriers and roads in the vicinity of the border of the United States to prevent unlawful entries into the United States in the project areas pursuant to sections 102(a) and 102(b) of [the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996]," Mayorkas said.
Though in the past the Biden administration worked on shuttering gaps in the wall, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) announced in June that there were plans to build up to 20 miles (32 kilometers) of wall in the RGV Sector in June. The construction is funded by Homeland Security's full-year 2019 appropriations bill.
The US-Mexico border has seen record numbers of illegal entries since President Joe Biden took office. Republicans have blamed the border chaos on Joe Biden’s determination to “undo everything former President Donald Trump had done”. Just recently, amid the scramble to avert a government shurdown, some Republicans opposed to further funding for Ukraine had underscored the need to instead focus on such issues as the migrant crisis plaguing the country.
After Biden took office, he wasted no time issuing a flurry of immigration-related executive orders, including putting a halt on construction of Trump’s border wall in early 2021. At the time, Biden had promised there would "not be another foot of wall constructed on my administration". The administration said that wall construction under the Trump administration was "just one example of the prior administration’s misplaced priorities and failure to manage migration in a safe, orderly, and humane way."
Biden also cancelled the "Remain in Mexico" policy, and scrapped the federal COVID emergency Title 42 health order on 11 May 2023. Title 42 , which dated back to the Trump administration, allowed US Border Patrol to turn migrants away at the border. After all these decisions were implemented, waves of migrants surged. According to media-cited Customs and Border Protection (CBP) sources, there were more than 260,000 encounters at the southern border in September — the highest monthly total on record. Furthermore, the number of people arrested in FY 2023 by Border Patrol at the southern border who are on the FBI's terror watchlist (officially called the Terrorist Screening Dataset) also hit a new record this year, with 151 arrests, almost double the 98 who came in full-year 2022.