Texas Democrats urge Biden to stop Trump’s border wall. What has president-elect said?
A group of Texas Democrats is urging President-elect Joe Biden to halt construction of the wall along the United States’ southern border with Mexico.
The Webb County Democratic Party Executive Committee passed a resolution Tuesday urging Biden to declare a moratorium on wall construction in the Laredo Sector, WGNO reported. They also called on Biden to stop the seizure of private property and public lands to build the wall and rescind the national emergency declaration at the border by President Donald Trump on Feb. 15, 2019.
“We have been fighting this wall for way too long to let our guard down. The people of Webb County will not rest until a stake is driven into the heart of this monster,” said Tricia Cortez, who advocated for the resolution as part of the No Border Wall Coalition, WGNO reported. “We will not allow the Trump Wall to become the Biden Wall.”
Trump has long made the construction of a border wall on the U.S.-Mexico border a central tenet of his presidential campaign and subsequent presidency, saying at his campaign launch speech in 2015 that “when Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. ... They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us.”
Trump, who promised Mexico would fund the wall’s construction, later said in the speech: “I would build a great wall, and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me, and I’ll build them very inexpensively, I will build a great, great wall on our southern border.”
Biden, a Democrat, has vowed to stop construction of the wall but didn’t commit to tearing down the wall that was built under the Republican Trump administration.
“There will not be another foot of wall constructed in my administration,” Biden told NPR in August.
Trump’s administration built 400 miles of bollards reaching 30 feet high along the border, with an expected 50 miles to be completed before the end of the year, AZCentral reported. The southern border stretches approximately 2,000 miles long.
Despite Trump’s promise that Mexico would cover the cost of the wall, U.S. taxpayers are paying for it. Congress allotted $4.4 billion for the wall over the last four years, and another $7 billion was diverted from the military, according to the newspaper.
Former Presidents George W. Bush, a Republican, and Barack Obama, a Democrat, constructed 654 miles of barriers and advocates for stricter immigration rules want that to continue under the Biden administration, according to NPR.
“These pro-immigration presidents put a great deal of money into securing the border because they believed that doing so would strengthen their case for passage of comprehensive immigration reform,” according to the non-partisan Brookings Institution.
Biden promised to “end the so-called National Emergency that siphons federal dollars from the Department of Defense to build a wall,” according to his campaign website.
In Feb. 2019, Trump issued a declaration that allows him to access both the Treasury Department and Pentagon budgets for $10.5 billion in funds for the border wall, according to AZCentral. Biden could withdraw from the declaration because it’s not a law.
Instead, Biden has pledged to use resources for “smart border enforcement efforts, like investments in improving screening infrastructure at our ports of entry,” according to his website.
Biden also said he would invest in the ports of entry, instead of building barriers, to target drugs that are smuggled over.
“We need smart, sensible policies that will actually strengthen our ability to catch these real threats by improving screening procedures at our legal ports of entry and investing in new technology,” Biden’s campaign website said.
Biden could stop construction of the wall and restore the federal processes that the Trump administration skirted to build the wall, according to Jared Orsi, professor of history at Colorado State University focusing on borderlands and environment history, NBC News reported.
The Department of Homeland Security waived the National Environmental Policy Act, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act and the National Historic Preservation Act in order to build the wall, according to the publication.
“The Biden administration can say we don’t just put up a wall. Instead, we’re going to study the hydrology of a region, the environmental impact, the impact on historic Native American graves before we start any project,” Orsi said. “All those were circumvented under Trump.”
This story was originally published November 25, 2020 at 10:55 AM with the headline "Texas Democrats urge Biden to stop Trump’s border wall. What has president-elect said?."