President Joe Biden’s former Border Patrol Chief Rodney Scott said this week that the administration was paying up to $5 million per day to contractors to not complete former President Donald Trump’s southern border wall.
What a shameful example of government waste and emblematic of the incompetency of the 46th president.
In a Tuesday interview, Scott recounted to Fox News anchor Bret Baier that on his first day in office Biden issued an executive order halting construction on the wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
“Many of those projects today are just still on hold, so we’re paying contractors. For a while, it was almost $5 million a day between [the Department of Defense] and [the Department of Homeland Security] to not build the border wall,” Scott said.
“There are stacks and stacks of border wall panels,” he added, along with “hundreds of miles of fiber optic cabling” and “hundreds of cameras” that are “just sitting. There is no action being taken.”
“That money is just trickling away to those contractors for not doing work each day,” Scott said.
A report released by Republicans serving on the Senate Subcommittee on Government Operations and Border Management in July put a firmer number on the cost of Biden’s order to end construction.
The minority staff report determined the president’s decision has cost taxpayers between $1.837 billion and $2.087 billion since Jan. 20.
“In January 2021, DOD contractors in charge of overseeing wall construction along the southern border received $10 billion in taxpayer money, which had been obligated toward wall-related projects,” a news release from subcommittee ranking member Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma said.
“By the end of June, the Biden Administration has wasted roughly 20 percent ($2 billion) of the $10 billion meant to build the wall to pay contractors to watch steel rust in the desert.”
The report says the cost stood at $3 million per day at the end of June.
Trump was able to successfully have 453 miles of new primary and secondary border wall built before Biden took office and was in the process of constructing 211 more miles in the Border Patrol’s San Diego, El Centro, Yuma, Tucson, El Paso, Del Rio, Laredo and Rio Grande Valley sectors.
Of course, some of those areas — like Del Rio and Yuma — have seen the greatest influx of migrants since Biden took office.
Scott told Baier that the Biden administration was made aware of what the catastrophic results of ending Trump’s policies would be.
“We made it very clear that if we dropped all of the initiatives that have been put in place over the last several years, that we would get an influx of mass migration that we would not be able to control,” he said.
Nonetheless, Biden ended Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy for those making asylum claims and signaled in his rhetoric and his administration’s actions a more lax border policy.
“The result of that is the message goes out. And then instead of having a couple of hundred encounters a day, we quickly went up to about 6,000 encounters a day,” Scott said.
The number of those apprehended crossing the southern border illegally during fiscal year 2021 exceeds the population of 11 American states.
According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, so far there have been over 1.5 million encounters of people crossing the southwest border through August, a 21-year high.
That number will go up by 200,000 or more when September’s numbers are included, if recent trends continue.
By comparison, there were just 458,000 encounters in all of 2020.
CBP Encounters, Southwest Land Border. (Check out those 2021 'single adult' numbers.)
No need to travel to see it 'first hand'… It's right there on the freaking website! pic.twitter.com/7G7q1sbaOn
— John Bundick (@DesperadoPro) September 23, 2021
Biden is mistaken if he thinks the American people don’t really care or take notice of the chaos at the border.
A Quinnipiac poll released Wednesday found that 67 percent of Americans disapprove of the president’s handling of immigration and the border.
In new Quinnipiac poll, President Biden’s approval rating drops to 38%, the lowest of his presidency, and his lowest marks come at the border.
23% approve of Biden’s handling of the border.
67% disapprove.25% approve of Biden’s handling of immigration issues.
67% disapprove.— Bill Melugin (@BillFOXLA) October 7, 2021
Last month, White House press secretary Jen Psaki chastised Republicans for “giving speeches about how outraged they are about the situation at the border. Not many who are putting forward solutions or steps that we could take.”
“So we’re a little tired of the speeches,” Psaki said.
.@PressSec Jen Psaki: "There are a lot of Republicans out there giving speeches about how outraged they are about the situation at the border. Not many who are putting forward solutions or steps that we could take. So we're a little tired of the speeches." pic.twitter.com/ujqfcJOrOX
— The Hill (@thehill) September 24, 2021
Here are two proven solutions: Stop wasting money and finish building the wall, and reinstate the remain in Mexico policy.
Trump showed the way.
Biden just has to be humble enough and care about the country enough to do his job and secure the border.