What is the status of Trump’s wall under the Biden Administration?

The fence in the small Texas town of Del Rio, on the border with Mexico, already existed when it was still unthinkable that Donald Trump would become president of the United States. The black strut skeleton stretches for more than three kilometers and is about three and a half meters high.

On the border with Mexico, Trump wanted to build a wall along long stretches. It was one of his most important projects. Also in Del Rio, a new barrier was to replace the old fence. But since the end of January the work has been stopped.

One of the first decisions of the current US president, Joe Biden, to take office was to paralyze the project of his Republican predecessor, suspending the financing of the wall, which with its high metal stelae looks more like a fence than a wall.

“Building a massive wall, spanning the entire southern border, is not a serious political solution,” Biden’s decree said in January. “It is a waste of money, distracting attention from real threats to our internal security.”

As a consequence, the workers also left Del Rio. The original black fence now runs in several sections parallel to various parts of the new brown wall more than nine meters high. Deep wells wait in vain for other parts of the new structure to be laid. Neither the old nor the new wall is complete there.

The local sheriff, Joe Frank Martinez, is especially angered by two places, in which the gaps between different sections of the wall were covered with a chain link fence temporarily. “It’s a shame,” he says. “They have to finish what they started.”

The sheriff of Val Verde County, located 200 miles southwest of Austin, says he can do without the new border wall in principle. Referring to the old fence, he says: “The structure we have there did its job. Could people climb? Yes, but I don’t think we had so many crosses because of that.”

The fence served so that criminals could not disappear into residential areas anywhere once they crossed the river, he says. “He took people from the city to outlying neighborhoods, so those charged with protecting the border had a better chance of arresting these people.” That served to increase security and lower the crime rate. If it were up to Sheriff Martinez, the new wall would have to be completed or the old one rebuilt.

In southeastern Texas, where they are already preparing for the next hurricane season, the abrupt halt of construction raised concerns about possible flooding. And it is that for the construction of new sections of Trump’s border wall, several parts of a containment dam were dismantled in the area, to be able to move construction material.

The levee protects Hidalgo County, a very low area, from flooding. The responsible district judge, Richard Cortez, warned in mid-April: “It is a very critical and dangerous situation.”

Now, the responsible unit of the US Army, the Army Corps of Engineers, announced that the dam in the Rio Grande valley will be repaired.

Before his election as president in 2016, Trump promised to build a “beautiful wall” along the 3,200 kilometers of the southern border, to keep out undocumented immigrants as well as drug traffickers and other criminals.

The US Congress refused to give him the means for this controversial initiative. But Trump evaded the blockade by declaring the southern border a national emergency zone and had the funds come from the defense budget. Part of Trump’s promise was that Mexico would pay for the wall, which however never happened.

According to official information, some 730 kilometers of the Trump project were completed. The former president originally spoke of about 1,100 to 1,450 kilometers, along which the wall would be erected. Due to the enormous resistance against his initiative, the then president was gradually renouncing his promises. In most cases, the new wall replaces existing and obsolete border facilities, as the example of Del Río illustrates.

Environmentalists applauded Biden’s decision to suspend construction of the wall. Activist Laiken Jordahl referred on Twitter to “terrible wounds” the project left in the wilderness of Arizona: mountain tops were blown up, thousands of ancient cacti were uprooted and destroyed. He affirms that Trump left chaos in the border areas and therefore demands that the money planned for the wall be invested in rebuilding natural environments.

From the point of view of Sheriff Leon Wilmot in Yuma County, Arizona, Biden puts national security at risk with his decision. Also in the Wilmot district the planned works were suspended. But 185 kilometers of the wall were erected, says the sheriff, part of them in a secluded area of ​​the desert. Wilmot’s main concern is the Mexican drug cartels, who, according to him, take advantage of the opening of the desert to bring illegal substances into the country.

Biden broke through the harsh isolation of Trump’s southern border. Minor migrants are no longer expelled, for humanitarian reasons. The families separated on the border with Mexico during the Trump administration will be reunited.

Biden generally maintains the entry ban ordered by Trump in the framework of the pandemic, but local media report that more and more exceptions are made, especially in the case of families with young children, who are considered especially at risk in Mexican cities borderlines.

Due to the increase in the number of captured migrants, especially from the Republican ranks, they accuse Biden of encouraging people, with the liberal course that his immigration policy acquired, to cross the border.

dpa

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