The U.S.-Mexico border from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico is 1,933 miles long. President Trump campaigned in 2016 on building a wall along the border to prevent illegal crossings into the U.S. from the south. As of October 23, 2020, late in the Trump administration, funds for 738 miles of wall had been appropriated. When Trump left office last month, approximately 450 miles had been completed. Hundreds more were still unfinished.
On January 20, Inauguration Day, it all came to a halt. True to his promise, President Joe Biden immediately ordered all wall construction work to cease. Work crews were told to demobilize their projects and to concentrate in the next few weeks on moving their excavators, bulldozers, and other movable equipment out of the area. Materials and equipment that either cannot be moved or are not convenient or profitable to move, such as portable toilets, mesh fencing, and stanchions, are being abandoned in the desert alongside the bits and pieces of a border wall that now may never be completed.
Though the construction workers, most of whom are now jobless, will disappear, all activity in these areas will not cease. Because, at the same time the new president stopped wall construction, he also canceled the “Remain in Mexico” policy, in effect re-instating Catch and Release.
Now, asylum seekers from Mexico and points south need only stroll through one of the many gaps in the abandoned wall system, flag down a Border Patrol officer, and after a perfunctory processing that may or may not include COVID-19 testing, hop aboard a Greyhound to anywhere in America.
Last week, Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-MT) conducted a tour of the U.S.-Mexico border near Nogales, New Mexico. Speaking to Townhall afterwards, Rosendale said the Biden orders had hurt American national security by opening the border to the trafficking of people, of sex, and drugs. All of that dangerous and illegal activity he says is made worse by the “gaping holes in security” left along the border. And by restoring Catch and Release, Biden has ensured that “every town in the nation has the potential to become a border town.”
For more, see Townhall.com.