Advertisement
OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author’s opinion.
Left-wing media types, Democrats, and pundits galore regularly blasted then-President Donald Trump’s border wall as “racist” and “anti-immigrant,” but most of them haven’t leveled similar criticism at President Joe Biden after his administration announced it would restart construction of the wall amid the worst illegal alien and drug-smuggling crises in recent memory.
“The Biden administration announced last week it would waive 26 federal restrictions to accelerate construction of the wall along the Texas-Mexico border. President Biden and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas have said their hands were essentially tied and their policy that walls don’t work hasn’t changed,” Fox News reported on Tuesday.
Mayorkas claimed in a statement this week: “We have repeatedly asked Congress to rescind this money, but it has not done so, and we are compelled to follow the law.”
That said, the liberal legacy media criticized Trump for years over the border wall.
“But he only talks about that wall as a solution, as a cure-all as a panacea, the whole back the Brown menace that he wants you to believe in, like we’re living in some bizarre ‘Game of Thrones’ drama, except the walkers are Brown not White of course,” former CNN host Chris Cuomo said during one of his shows.
Jason Johnson previously said on MSNBC that a wall at the southern border was a “monument to White Nationalism.”
Advertisement
“Anybody who agrees to give any money to this wall is foolish,” he added, per Fox News.
Rick Tyler, an MSNBC contributor, claimed without proof in 2018 that Trump’s wall was all about keeping “non-White people” from crossing the border. He added another baseless claim, that any fears surrounding the wall were “all race-based.”
Tyler also wondered aloud why Trump wasn’t worried about Canadians, who he said had the “biggest Visa overstays.”
“Why aren’t we concerned about the Canadians’ Visa overstays? Because they’re White people,” he said at the time.
Futuro Media Group president and CEO Maria Hinojosa told MSNBC’s Joy Reid in 2019 that the wall was “racist.”
“What is this all about? This is about a wall that is to keep people like me and my students and their families out. It is a wall that is racist. So that’s why there is all of this human suffering,” she charged, again without proof.
The New York Times’ Mara Gay, meanwhile, deemed the wall a “$6 billion monument to hatred and division” in 2019 after the government reopened following a brief shutdown.
“I think just pulling back and remembering that the government was shut down and all of this pain to the economy, to these individual workers was felt, not for healthcare, right, but actually to allow the president to build a $6 billion monument to hatred and division and something we don’t actually have any practical need for. It would have been a huge tragedy. We have real problems in this country. We have an opioid epidemic, we have a housing crisis, we have infrastructure crisis,” she claimed then.
Biden told reporters last week that he didn’t think a border wall would work but that he allegedly can’t do anything about it.
“I’ll answer one question on the border wall, the border wall where money was appropriated for the border wall. I tried to get them to reappropriate, to redirect that money,” the president said, addressing reports. “They didn’t. They wouldn’t. And in the meantime, there’s nothing under the law other than they have to use the money for what it was appropriated. I can’t stop that.”
Advertisement
If that is true, then that means the Democrat-controlled Congress passed funding for the wall, since Republicans have not had a majority yet for an entire budget year and have yet to pass most appropriations bills, and then Biden signed whatever appropriations measure contained funding for the wall.
In any event, skeptics of this president and his party say they believe the administration is backing new border wall construction because it is politically expedient in an election year. In a recent Gallup survey, for instance, the number of respondents who wanted immigration scaled back rose to 41 percent this year, up from 28 percent in 2020.
“President Joe Biden’s popularity was near the lowest level of his presidency this month as Americans’ concerns over immigration rose to their highest level since 2019, before he took office, a Reuters/Ipsos poll showed,” the newswire reported on Tuesday.