Biden cancels the emergency that Trump imposed to build the border wall

WASHINGTON – President Joe Biden rescinded the statement of “ national emergency ”with which former president Donald Trump , achieved that billions of dollars allocated by Congress for military expenditures were used for the construction of the wall on the border with Mexico, the White House reported Thursday.

In a letter sent to the president of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, Biden said she had determined that the declaration of a national emergency on the southern border “was not justified.”

“I have also announced that it will be my government’s policy that no more taxpayer dollars be diverted to the construction of a border wall, and I have arranged for a careful review of all resources assigned or redirected to that work, ”Biden wrote.

L Trump’s declaration, says the Democrat, “is considered finished”, so the “authorities invoked in that Proclamation will no longer be used to build a wall on the southern border.”

Biden’s decision follows others to cut ties with Trump’s wall work, such as his administration’s recent request that The Supreme Court of Justice will cancel a scheduled hearing on the legality of the border wall.

The construction of a barrier along the 1, 954 miles (3, 145 km) of the United States border with Mexico was one of the most prominent promises of Trump in his presidential campaign of 2016, but Congress refused to allocate the funding he requested, so Trump opted for that declaration of “national emergency” to achieve his objective.

AND he wall was one of the main components of Trump’s immigration policy , which included the detention of hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants, restrictions on asylum for people who fleeing violence or persecution in their countries, and sending tens of thousands of asylum seekers to Mexico and Central America.

So much so that Trump dedicated one of his last presidential trips to the border, and eight days before leaving the White House, Trump traveled to the border town of Alamo in Texas, where he said that the wall is a “success story”, much as never managed to get Mexico to pay for the works, as promised.

For this reason and, given the refusal of Congress to finance the works, Trump declared late in 2018 that there was a national emergency on the southern border and ordered the use of $ 2, 500 million dollars that Congress had approved for the Department of Defense, in order to continue with the works begun.

That decision by Trump generated dozens of legal demands, which have come until the Supreme Court of Justice, and efforts by the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives to restrict the resources destined to the construction of a wall.

But they could not prevent the process from continuing and accelerating in the final months of Trump’s term, when 450 miles ( 720 kilometers) of barrier at the border.

From the day of his inauguration, last 20 January, Biden promised a “just and humane” immigration policy and signed 17 decrees that annulled Trump decrees and advanced proposals for the legalization of some 11 millions of undocumented immigrants.

One of the decrees imposed a pause in the work of the border wall. “Like all nations, the United States has the right and the duty to protect its borders and its citizens against threats,” Biden said at the time. “But building a huge wall along the entire southern border is not a serious solution.”

The work, added Biden, “is a waste. of money that distracts attention from genuine threats against the security of the homeland. ”

In addition to the review of the legality of the funds already allocated and the processes

With the cancellation of the “national emergency”, Biden continues to release the burden of immigration measures of his predecessor, but he still has a long and complicated task to untangle the tangle of socks that the Republican approved during his term.