Mayorkas Does 180 on Border, Declares Wall Is Needed in Texas and He Wants It Done Fast
Well, that was quick.
In August, several outlets reported that President Joe Biden’s Pentagon had begun selling off parts that had already been fabricated as part of a wall on the nation’s southern border — all to subvert efforts on the part of Republicans to restart construction.
“Steel ‘square structural tubes’ photographed in a storage lot in Arizona were listed for sale on GovPlanet, an online auction marketplace run by publicly traded Canadian company Ritchie Bros. Auctioneers, this month,” Fox News reported Aug. 20.
“Those 28-foot-tall hollow beams are ‘excess border wall materials that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers turned over to the DLA for disposition and are now for sale,’ the Department of Defense’s logistics agency first confirmed to the Daily Upside and later the New York Post.”
The reason? The so-called Finish It Act, which called upon the administration to construct portions of the wall for which panels already had been purchased, had been included in the appropriations bill that cleared the Democrat-controlled Senate, and the administration wanted to sell off those portions ASAP before the wall that had been paid for was required to be built by law.
Less than two months later, the Department of Homeland Security so desperately wants to build a border wall to deflect an immediate crisis along the southern border in Texas that Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has waived 26 separate environmental laws to get it erected posthaste.
Mayorkas said Wednesday that there was an “acute and immediate need” for a border wall in a Federal Register filing requesting that the government ignore what The Washington Times called “some of the country’s most iconic environmental protection laws.”
“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,” Mayorkas said in the filing.
“In order to ensure the expeditious construction of the barriers and roads in the project areas, I have determined that it is necessary that I exercise the authority that is vested in me by section 102(c) of IIRIRA [Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act of 1996],” he said.
That act, the Times reported, “gives the Homeland Security secretary the power to waive laws when necessary to facilitate border construction.”
“Mr. Mayorkas’s waiver covers 26 federal laws, including the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Eagle Protection Act and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act,” the outlet said.
This is in spite of the fact that Biden had promised during the campaign that, were he elected, there would “not be another foot of wall constructed” under his administration and had said on his Inauguration Day that the wall was a “waste of money that diverts attention from genuine threats to our homeland security.”
Mayorkas was of a similar opinion, too, since this is what the GOP members of the House Homeland Security Committee noted in a social media post after the Times reported the quick about-face:
Interesting news considering Secretary Mayorkas told this Committee under oath that he supported Biden’s decision to end border wall construction.🤔 https://t.co/YyCZ15ZRd8 pic.twitter.com/WjOdqqypBL
— House Homeland GOP (@HomelandGOP) October 4, 2023
Mind you, Mayorkas had already about-faced on the border wall, promising more would be built. This, however, was the first time he’s made a show about fast-tracking it under the IIRIRA.
It’s not difficult to see why the administration is in such a hurry to do this: The border crisis is back in full swing, fueled in part by a new wave of migrants from Venezuela.
The president already has granted work orders to nearly half a million Venezuelans who came to the country illegally, and many illegal immigrants with asylum claims have court dates tentatively set in the 2030s.
It’s amazing, however, how the administration can turn on a dime when an election year is coming up and a border crisis — on top of the failure of “Bidenomics” and the weaponization of the justice system against the political opposition — doesn’t look too hot to independent voters who gave doddering Uncle Joe and his crew a chance the last time around.
However, the border crisis didn’t happen overnight, and it won’t be stopped overnight, either.
It’s nice to see Biden and his DHS belatedly admit that walls work, but it’s too little, too late for an administration that has seen a record number of illegal immigrants cross the southern border.
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