by Frank Holmes, reporter
President Donald Trump promised to build a “big, beautiful wall” on the southern border. President’s Trump’s campaign promise may just be fulfilled… but by President Joe Biden.
Biden has given the green light for his administration to go forward with Trump’s border wall.
That’s a major change from a candidate who promised to bring Trump’s wall to an end. Joe Biden laid out his plan for curtailing the wall throughout the 2020 campaign: “Not another foot,” he told crowds of cheering liberals.
That’s all come to an end. Border wall construction has resumed.
On Wednesday, the CBP held a meeting on Biden’s “Border Barrier Remediation Plan,” his secret plan to build parts of the wall along the U.S.-Mexico border stretching from Texas all the way to California.
The plan already had the approval of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who defended Biden’s flip-flop by saying the administration would “deploy modern, effective border measures” and improve “safety and security along the Southwest Border.”
Biden says the new construction is just plugging holes in the wall, especially near Yuma, Arizona. Illegal aliens have to cross over a dam, where they can easily fall to their death…or lure Border Patrol agents trying to rescue them to their deaths.
White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre said Biden isn’t building the wall; he’s just “cleaning up” the “mess” left behind by the Trump administration.
But the untidy conditions aren’t exactly Trump’s fault. After Democratic obstruction, Trump freed up emergency funding and built 450 miles of border wall before Biden slammed the brakes last January. The sudden halt cost taxpayers $6 million a day to pay workers to do nothing.
Now, Biden is cleaning up his own mess, without admitting he ruined the solution Trump handed him.
“There’s some desperation in the White House,” said former Trump Acting DHS Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli on “Fox and Friends” Tuesday morning. He says Biden is trying to have it both ways: Building the border wall to help Arizona Democrats in the 2022 midterms, then putting the project back on hold after election day.
Publicly, the CBP said “all border barrier construction projects have been canceled”…except this massive project.
But it’s not a perfect solution: The final state of Biden’s plan will still leave enormous holes in the border wall.
Cuccinelli said building only part of the wall will just redirect illegal immigration to other parts of the border with no protection.
Even with this limited rebuilding plan, it’s not clear how Biden would get his fellow Democrats on board. They’ve called Trump’s border wall unnecessary, unhelpful, and immoral.
“A wall, in my view, is an immorality. It’s the least effective way to protect the border and the most costly,” said Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., in 2019. “I can’t think of any reason why anyone would think it’s a good idea — unless this has something to do with something else.”
Biden’s entire party—and his own presidential campaign—slammed the wall. “We will start by righting the wrongs of the Trump Administration,” declared the 2020 Democratic Party platform, which Biden ran on. “Democrats will rescind President Trump’s fabricated “National Emergency,” which siphons funding away from our men and women in uniform to construct an unnecessary, wasteful, and ineffective wall on the southern border.”
A reversal like this reeks of hypocrisy. Then again, Democrats haven’t always been against a border wall.
Hillary Clinton said she supported funding “to build a barrier to try to prevent illegal immigrants from coming in.” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said that “illegal immigration is wrong, plain and simple.” Former President Barack Obama declared, “We simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States undetected, undocumented, unchecked.”
Even Biden once voted for a border fence.
Democrats have also been all in favor of keeping people out of their areas. They erected walls or fences around the 2016 Democratic National Convention, around the U.S. Capitol last January, around the U.S. Supreme Court after death threats against pro-life justices in May, and most recently a $500,000 wall around Joe Biden’s beach house in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.
Biden’s decision to build part of the wall is the perfect encapsulation of his presidency: It admits his administration’s policy was a complete failure, blames Trump, and fails to repent deeply enough to embrace a real solution.
That won’t come until 2024.
Frank Holmes is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative that talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”