The outgoing Trump administration is rushing to complete as much of Trump’s infamous Mexico border wall as possible before Joe Biden takes office in January, a new report has said.
According to The New York Times, construction on the wall, which stood at around 400 miles as of November 2020, is continuing at breakneck speed ahead of Mr Biden’s inauguration in January.
Mr Biden has said that his incoming administration does not intend to tear down what has been built of the wall but stipulated that they will not keep building it, or use money from the Pentagon to fund it.-
According to the report, the administration’s blasting crews are swiftly tearing through the remote Peloncillo Mountains in forbidding terrain with dynamite, reflecting an increasing urgency to install the structure.
“Wildlife corridors, the archaeology and history, that’s all being blasted to oblivion or destroyed already,” Bill McDonald, 68, a cattleman and former lifelong Republican who voted for Mr Biden, told The Times.
“Tragedy is the word I use to describe it.”
Similar invasive work is reported to take place this month in the Guadalupe Canyon, an oasis-like habitat for rare species of birds, where crews are detonating cliff sides on a daily basis.
Critics say that the canyon was so remote that crossings by migrants in the area were expectionally infrequent to begin with.
“This isn’t just heartbreaking but totally pointless,” Diana Hadley, an historian whose family’s ranch includes much of Guadalupe Canyon, told the newspaper.
Defenders of the project have said that the wall offers protection to communities and improves security, allowing border protection to target migration in certain areas.
“We will see the benefits greatly once this wall system is in place without a doubt,” Brian Hastings, the Customs and Border Protection chief for the Rio Grande Valley sector told the newspaper. “It allows us to be able to respond quicker.”
The Republican mayor of Douglas, Donald Huish, argued: “We’d reached the saturation point of finding illegal aliens in our back alleys, and now that situation has changed.”
Source: Yahoo News