Joining the growing clamor for the administration to take more seriously its responsibility to defend the southern border is West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, a moderate Democrat known for occasionally working with Republicans.
Manchin joined that clamor in a recent statement to Fox News Digital, in which he said that it is time for the Democrat Party and Biden Administration to wake up to the situation at the southern border and start dealing with it before it is too late, particularly as it becomes ever more obvious that the situation is deleteriously impacting the entire country.
He said, in a statement to Fox News Digital, “Far-left Democrats in Washington have to come to grips with the fact that we have to shut down the border. Similar to President Trump, the Biden administration should call a national emergency on the border because this crisis is impacting every corner of our country.”
Continuing, Sen. Manchin added that he thinks there need to be more opportunities and pathways for people to enter the country legally, but also that the border needs to be defended by a wall with enough Border Patrol agents to keep an eye on things.
He said, “We must work together to create an immigration policy that gives people the chance to come here legally as well as strengthens our border security with additional Border Patrol agents, new technology and a border wall.”
Sen. Manchin’s statement to Fox News Digital is similar to what he said in a Thursday “Morning Joe” interview, during which he called for Biden and his administration to take the border situation as seriously as Trump did.
He said, “The administration, the president has to say, ‘Enough is enough.’ And what Trump did, he basically declared a state of emergency.” He continued, “You have to build the wall. There’s areas we need the wall, and there’s areas where we need technology.”
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Sen. Manchin’s statements on the matter come alongside the Biden Administration reversing course and deciding to start constructing some sort of barrier along the border after Biden shut down new border wall construction in 2021.
Biden promised as a presidential candidate that there would “not be another foot of wall constructed on my administration,” and his administration previously had said border wall construction under the Trump administration was “just one example of the prior administration’s misplaced priorities and failure to manage migration in a safe, orderly and humane way.”
Now it is reversing course, with Secretary Mayorkas, long a target of conservative ire over his handling of the border crisis, declaring that a border barrier will be constructed to try to staunch the flow of illegal immigrants into the countr.
“There is presently an acute and immediate need to construct physical barriers and roads in the vicinity of the border of the United States in order to prevent unlawful entries into the United States in the project areas pursuant to sections 102(a) and 102(b) of [the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996],” Mayorkas said.
Featured image credit: By United States Senate photography studio – manchin.senate.gov, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=64565521