Joe Biden to use Trump-era funds for border wall, says he has no choice

US President Joe Biden on Thursday defended his administration’s decision to waive 26 federal laws in South Texas to allow for construction of roughly 32km (20 miles) of additional border wall, saying he had no choice but to use the Trump-era funding for the barrier to stop illegal migration from Mexico.

Asked if he thought such walls work, he said flatly: “No.”

The new construction was announced in June, but the funds were appropriated in 2019 before the Democratic president took office. Biden said he tried to get lawmakers to redirect the money but Congress refused, and the law requires the funding to be used as approved and the construction to be completed in 2023.

“The money was appropriated for the border wall,” Biden said. “I can’t stop that.”

Still, the waiving of federal laws for the construction – something also done when Republican Donald Trump was president – raised questions, particularly because Biden condemned border wall spending when he was running for the White House.

One of Biden’s first decisions moves as president was to halt the use of emergency funds to build the wall along the Southern border and ended the national emergency there.

The decision comes as the Biden administration is struggling to manage increasing numbers of migrants at the border and spreading out in the larger US Democratic leaders in New York, Chicago and Washington are asking for federal help to handle the growing numbers of migrants in their cities.

Republicans, for their part, are hammering the president as ineffective on border policy, with some suggesting they would not fund any more efforts in Ukraine without a substantial increase to border security funding.

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The decision was met with immediate criticism from immigrant advocates and Mexico President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who called it a “setback”.

“It is a setback because it does not resolve the problem,” he said Thursday. Lopez Obrador had frequently praised Biden in the past because “he is the first US president in a long time who has not built any walls”.

The Department of Homeland Security posted the announcement of the latest wall action in the Federal Registry with few details about the construction in Starr County, Texas, part of a busy Border Patrol sector seeing “high illegal entry”.

According to government data, about 245,000 illegal crossings have been recorded so far this budget year in the Rio Grande Valley Sector. It is among the busiest for border crossings in the nation.

Much of the land along the Rio Grande is subject to erosion and is part of federally protected habitats for plants and animals.

A federal project along the river would ordinarily require a series of environmental reviews. Congress gave US immigration authorities the ability to waive those reviews to put up such barriers more quickly.

“The Biden administration’s decision to rush into border wall construction marks a profound failure,” said Jonathan Blazer, director of border strategies at the American Civil Liberties Union.

“On the campaign trail, President Biden put it best when he said that the border wall is not a serious policy solution – and we couldn’t agree more. Instead of upholding this promise, the Biden administration is doubling down on the failed policies of the past that have proven wasteful and ineffective.”

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This is not the first time that border wall has been constructed under the Biden administration.

Homeland Security has also worked on roughly 21km (13 miles) in the Rio Grande Valley, and another small-scale project to fill “small gaps that remain open from prior construction activities” in the border wall.

But the border wall has been synonymous with Trump’s restrictive immigration policies.

He said he wanted to build a wall and have Mexico pay for it, then declared a national emergency to fund construction when Congress would not appropriate funds for it.