While Biden gets on the stage and screams that the border disaster is not his fault and that he needs more legislation, his administration has actually been undermining efforts to solve the problem. Case in point, they tried to divert $1.4 billion in congressionally funded appropriations away from border wall construction.
Don’t believe Biden when he claims he cares about the millions of illegals that have streamed into this country during his tenure because every single action he’s taken since he took office shows that he does not.
On Friday, a federal judge in Texas hit back.
A U.S. District Court handed Texas a win in the first round of a case that consolidated two lawsuits filed against the Biden administration for halting border wall construction.
In 2020 and 2021, Congress allocated roughly $1.4 billion to fund “the construction of [a] barrier system along the southwest border.” On President Joe Biden’s first day in office, he ordered construction be halted. Because contracts had already been implemented, it cost taxpayers an initial $6 million, then $3 million a day for the border wall not to be built. Materials that had already been paid to build the wall were left to rust on the ground.
The guy who says he’s committed to securing the border left millions dollars of tax-payer-funded equipment to get destroyed by the elements. Nice.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton applauded the ruling:
🚨 Today, I secured a preliminary injunction against an attempt by the Biden Administration to illegally redirect statutorily obligated funds away from the construction of a border wall. Biden acted completely improperly by refusing to spend the money that Congress appropriated… https://t.co/MGBJD2nOya
— Attorney General Ken Paxton (@KenPaxtonTX) March 9, 2024
Paxton’s tweet continues:
Biden acted completely improperly by refusing to spend the money that Congress appropriated for border wall construction, and even attempting to redirect those funds. His actions demonstrate his desperation for open borders at any cost, but Texas has prevailed.
The case has been winding its way through the courts since 2021:
In October 2021, Missouri and Texas sued the president and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, requesting the court order them to complete border wall construction. Former Texas General Land Office Commissioner George P. Bush also sued. The GLO owns over 500,000 acres of land near the U.S.-Mexico border, with an estimated 31 linear miles along the Rio Grande. When Gov. Greg Abbott began building Texas’ own border wall, the area where it was first constructed was on GLO land.
Mayorkas, who like his boss Biden has refused since the beginning to take any meaningful action, has been fighting them every step of the way.
In response to the lawsuits, Mayorkas, as he has in nearly every lawsuit filed against him, argued he has “discretion” to change or implement policies how he sees fit. In this case, DHS argued regardless of the statutory language stipulating that funds be used to construct the border wall and barriers, he had discretion over how those funds could be spent.
The cases were consolidated, and as they progressed, Mayorkas moved forward with reallocating border wall funding to focus on environmental projects and maintenance repairs instead.
In his ruling, the judge said that Texas had proven injury:
“Texas has shown injury-in-fact through costs that it has incurred in administering driver’s licenses, education, and healthcare to a rising number of illegal aliens,” he wrote in his ruling. “Traceability is met because Texas has sufficiently demonstrated that the failure to build more physical barriers will reduce the number of apprehensions that otherwise would have occurred. And finally, this controversy is redressable because it is likely that a favorable judicial decision would reduce the financial harms that Texas otherwise would incur.”
Biden and his team will assuredly try to fight this, or they will simply refuse to lift a finger to help. Texas and other states must continue the fight.
