Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has said for years that the border is secure. Now, all of a sudden, he sees a need to begin building a border wall.
Mayorkas announced that he is using his authority to waive 26 federal laws, including the Clean Air Act, Endangered Species Act, and Safe Drinking Water Act, in order to address the “acute and immediate need to construct physical barriers” on the border. Indeed, there were almost 233,000 border encounters in August, and the strain of illegal immigrants has extended from border communities to liberal “sanctuary cities” such as Chicago and New York.
THE RECKLESS ALLIANCE THAT DEPOSED MCCARTHY
And yet, the “acute and immediate” need for “physical barriers” has been evident for some time now. The August number is not the largest number of border crossings during the Biden administration; that would be last December, when more than 250,000 people crossed the border illegally. In fact, that August number is only the fifth-most since Biden has taken office, and the border crisis was straining border towns well before Biden was even inaugurated.
Yet all this time, Mayorkas claimed the border was secure and not open. “The border is secure,” Mayorkas told us in April of this year, a month that included nearly 212,000 crossings. “Our borders are not open,” he said a few weeks later in May after another 206,000 crossings. He said it in January of this year (157,000 crossings), May of last year (241,000 crossings), and March 2021 (his third month on the job, when border crossings nearly doubled to 173,000).
And even now, while Mayorkas says there is an “acute and immediate need” for a border wall, President Joe Biden and his team are insisting that this is only happening because Congress has forced his hand. So, which is it? Is the border secure and a wall unnecessary, or is there an “immediate need” to build physical barriers to keep people from crossing?
President Biden defends moving to build border barriers in a portion of the Rio Grande Valley, saying funding was already appropriated and he “can't stop that” despite asking Congress to redirect the money.
— The Recount (@therecount) October 5, 2023
Asked if he thinks the border wall works, Biden says “No.” pic.twitter.com/U9dRRl4Lbk
No one in the Biden administration knows, given that Biden is incompetent and incoherent and that Mayorkas has said the border is secure through bigger surges and more crossings than we are seeing now. The real answer is that the border was never secure under Biden and that “physical barriers” were always needed to ease the strain of illegal immigration.
If nothing else, this is proof that Mayorkas should be impeached, or at the very least hauled in front of Congress to explain why only now the border isn’t secured as he has said for over two years. Both Mayorkas and Biden need to answer for the past contradictions and their current conflicting messages about the “need” to build a wall that is so urgent that 26 federal environmental laws must be waived immediately.