There’s been a huge development in the crisis at the U.S. southern border. After immediately shutting down the border wall construction when President Biden took office, the Biden administration has now reversed course and approved building a border wall in part of Texas.
The decision comes in the middle of a new flood of migrant crossings – an increase that’s weighing down public resources across the country.
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The administration is using sweeping executive powers to waive more than two dozen federal laws, allowing the construction of up to 20 miles of border wall in an area of south Texas where 245,000 migrants have crossed this year alone.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas stated, “There is presently an acute and immediate need to construct physical barriers and roads in the vicinity of the United States in order to prevent unlawful entries….”
It’s a course-reversal from the president’s 2021 proclamation ending all border wall construction. In the 2020 campaign, he said, “There will not be another foot of wall constructed on my administration.”
However, a tidal wave of migrant crossings has national Democrats calling for the president to take action. Border Patrol encountered more than 200,000 migrants in September alone, the highest number of encounters so far this year.
It’s a crisis felt across the country as busloads of migrants arrive in major cities.
Migrants sit in a queue outside of The Roosevelt Hotel that is being used by the city as temporary housing, July 31, 2023, in New York. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)
“We’re going to tell them that coming to New York doesn’t mean you’re going to stay in a 5-star hotel,” said New York City Mayor Eric Adams. “It doesn’t mean that the mere fact you come here you automatically are going to be allowed to work.”
Mayor Adams now is on a four-day trip to South and Central America. He says his city can’t accommodate the 120,000 migrants who’ve arrived in recent months. The number of buses filled with asylum seekers has nearly tripled in recent days.
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Adams isn’t the only mayor speaking out.
“We need to go assess the situation just like our team has gone to D.C.,” said Mayor Brandon Johnson of Chicago. “We need better coordination, quite frankly.”
Mayor Johnson now plans to visit the border, as his city is expecting as many as two dozen more buses from Texas.
And Illinois’ governor accuses the federal government of a “lack of intervention and coordination.”
Meanwhile, environmental advocates say they’re shocked the Democratic administration made the decision to resume building the wall. They’re upset the barriers will travel through public lands where endangered plants and species live.
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