In El Paso, Texas, May 11, 2023 (AFP / Patrick T. Fallon)
Joe Biden, accused by the right of laxity in the face of migrant arrivals, assured Thursday that he was legally obliged to continue the construction of a wall with Mexico, a flagship measure of his predecessor Donald Trump.
The 80-year-old Democrat, a candidate for re-election, said he “could not interrupt” the funding committed by the Republican billionaire, as he had not been able to convince Congress to use these funds for other measures.
The same day, the White House announced the resumption of direct deportation flights to Venezuela for illegal immigrants, which had been interrupted for years.
The Minister of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, indicated that a new portion of wall would be erected in the Rio Grande Valley, on the border with Mexico.
“There is currently an acute and immediate need to construct physical barriers… to prevent illegal entry,” the minister said in an official notice published by the United States Federal Register.
This led to Joe Biden being accused of an about-face, he who had promised on the day he took office, in January 2021, that the taxpayer would no longer pay for the construction of a wall.
The minister then assured on the social network border. We have always made it clear that a wall is not a solution.”
In Mexico, President Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador, who meets the head of American diplomacy Antony Blinken on Thursday, judged that it was a “step backwards”.
– “Absolutely false” –
“The money was intended for the border wall. I tried to convince (the Republicans in Congress) to allocate the funds to something else, to redirect them. They did not want to,” defended Joe Biden .
US President Joe Biden at the White House, October 5, 2023 in Washington (AFP / Brendan Smialowski)
“In the meantime, it is not legally possible to use this money for anything other than what it was intended for,” continued the Democrat to justify a decision strongly criticized by certain elected officials of his party, in particular in the left wing.
The American president, regularly accused by Republicans of laxity in the face of the migration crisis, assured that “no”, he did not believe that building walls was a solution.
“We apply the law,” insisted its spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre.
Donald Trump, rival of Joe Biden and favorite of the right for the next presidential election, did not fail to react.
This announcement shows that “I was right when I built 900 km (…) of a beautiful, brand new border wall”, he wrote on his Truth Social platform.
Funds for the wall’s construction come from an allocation approved by Congress for this specific purpose in 2019, when Donald Trump was in office.
– Angle of attack –
Republicans have made immigration one of their favorite angles of attack against the White House. The right wing of the party, for example, opposes the release of additional funds for Ukraine, believing that this money should instead be used to fight the migration crisis.
Workers replace old border barriers on the American side, September 28, 2023 in Playas de Tijuana, Mexico (AFP / Guillermo Arias)
Conservative senator Lindsey Graham asked to link the two subjects, while the American Congress must vote on a new budget, and therefore on a possible extension for Ukraine, before November 17, under penalty of paralysis of the State federal.
The White House defended itself from using the construction of the wall to bargain for the support of Republican parliamentarians for a new financial effort in favor of the Ukrainians: “I would not make the link between the two,” said Karine Jean-Pierre.
Regarding Venezuela, the Biden administration will resume direct expulsions by plane in the coming days, suspended for years due to the very degraded security situation in this country.
Venezuelans are one of the nationalities most represented among the migrants who regularly arrive at the southern border of the United States.