On the campaign trail in 2020, President Joe Biden promised that “not another foot” would be built on the Southern border wall.
However, it seems the Biden administration walked back that promise on Thursday (July 28) when it quietly authorized the completion of a section of the wall close to Yuma, Arizona.
The plan includes filing four gaps in the wall that has made Yuma one of the busiest corridors for illegal immigration crossings.
The plan was authorized by the Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas and will be funded by the DHS’s 2021 budget, despite initially being planned to be funded by the Defense Department.
Closing the gaps in the wall comes as the Yuma border remains an unresolved issue for the Biden administration, with border patrol agents stopping 160,000 illegal between January and June this year.
This figure represents four times the number of stops that took place last year, causing Yuma to remain one of the busiest migration cities in Arizona.
Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ.) has been calling on the President to secure the border wall, with leaders from the Republicans doing the same.
But most damming for Biden is that he used the Mexico-U.S. wall as a talking point throughout his campaign and contrasted his policies to Trump’s.
Biden has also disparaged the Trump administration’s apparent “racist” and “xenophobic” attempt to build the wall but hasn’t shared the same sentiment about the Yuma wall completion project.
