The 2020 presidential election might seem like a thousand political years ago, but something then-candidate Joe Biden said then — and has often repeated some variation of in the years since — is coming up again after the commander in chief contradicted his own supposedly serious moral beliefs.
In the summer of 2020, Biden made his stance on border barriers abundantly clear. "There will not be another foot of wall constructed on my administration, No. 1," Biden said according to an article from National Public Radio.
"I'm going to make sure that we have border protection, but it's going to be based on making sure that we use high-tech capacity to deal with it," Biden also said at the time. "And at the ports of entry — that's where all the bad stuff is happening."
Well, Biden has not made sure that the United States has "border protection," and his promised use of "high-tech capacity" has not done anything to stem the flow of, recently, 7,000 illegal immigrant crossings per day, nor the record-breaking number of apprehensions and known "got-aways" which have made the U.S. appear to have no southern border at all. Not for nothing, Biden's 2020 focus on ports of entry was likely because during the Trump years, surges of illegals entering the country unlawfully between ports of entry were — compared to now — nonexistent.
But now, ports of entry are a drop in the bucket compared to the thousands of illegal immigrants fording the Rio Grande, sprinting for holes in border walls from California to Texas, or attempting to scale barriers. With big city Democrats in New York, Chicago, and elsewhere begging the Biden administration for help now that they've realized the reality of the border crisis, the administration is taking some limited action — in violation of Biden's previous promises.
As AP reported of Biden's latest flip-flop:
The Biden administration announced it waived 26 federal laws in South Texas to allow border wall construction on Wednesday, marking the administration’s first use of a sweeping executive power employed often during the Trump presidency.
The Department of Homeland Security posted the announcement on the U.S. Federal Registry with few details outlining the construction in Starr County, Texas, which is part of a busy Border Patrol sector seeing “high illegal entry.” According to government data, about 245,000 illegal entries have been recorded so far this fiscal year in the Rio Grande Valley Sector which contains 21 counties.
“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,” Alejandro Mayorkas, the DHS secretary, stated in the notice.
An "acute and immediate need," eh? If only someone had warned the Biden administration of what their open-border policies would bring... and if the Biden administration hadn't sued Texas over its use of buoys to dissuade Rio Grande crossings and been caught cutting razor wire along the border in Texas, this might look like actual action.
Biden while running for president in 2020: "There will not be another foot of wall constructed on my administration.”
— Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) October 4, 2023
Biden’s DHS now: “There is presently an acute and immediate need to construct physical barriers…” as they look to expedite building approx 20 miles of new wall…
The Biden administration's utterly incoherent border policy has been ruinous from the start, and the resulting chaos — both in border communities and cities around the country — has apparently finally become untenable enough for someone in Biden's orbit to realize that a physical barrier ought to be a part of border security.
And while Biden taking Trump-style action to waive laws in order to clear the way for construction of some wall in Texas, without serious policy fixes, the crisis-causing surge of illegal immigrants won't simply go away. The wall, as Trump realized, was just one piece of an overall border security plan. There was also "Remain in Mexico" and other policies that prevented the chaos Americans are witnessing today.
As long as Biden continues his current policies of apprehending and then quickly releasing illegal immigrants into the U.S. with years-away court appearances scheduled and little to no way of tracking down those who are released as they find housing in overwhelmed sanctuary cities, things won't meaningfully improve.
Not to mention the Biden administration's practice of helping unlawful entrants disappear into the interior, as this writer witnessed first-hand on a recent flight from Arizona filled with illegal aliens, placed on the first morning flight out to keep the practice hidden from the eyes of most of the the flying public. They were headed to Denver, Philadelphia, and D.C., based on the tickets clutched by the illegal immigrants along with their manila envelopes containing instructions from the government, likely not to be seen by authorities again.
They, along with the millions of illegal immigrants who've unlawfully entered the U.S. already — including the record-breaking number of known (and likely unknown) "got-aways" means that the country's security has already been exploited and we don't full understand the danger of those who've snuck into the U.S., another problem Biden needs to address if he's to pretend he has any interest in national security.
Biden's fellow Democrats are likely to oppose his new plan to construct a new stretch of border wall, but it's the first sign — and potentially a hopeful one — that his stance on illegal immigration may be cracking. Still, without significant policy changes, it's doomed to become another empty gesture meant to suggest action but devoid of an actual plan to stop the surge of illegal immigration.