Officials in Arizona say they will not comply with the Biden administration's order to remove shipping containers which were stacked to serve as a temporary border barrier.
Team Biden is pressing Arizona to remove the barrier which it put in place to fill in gaps in the U.S.-Mexico border wall and is promising that the federal government will install a new temporary barrier sometime in 2023.
Arizona, which says it has suffered greatly due to Team Biden's open border policies, isn't buying it.
“The suggestion by any federal bureaucracy, that we take action to make the border easier to cross, is completely unacceptable. Gov. (Doug) Ducey takes the responsibility to protect Arizona very seriously — that’s why we put up these containers,” Ducey’s communications director, C.J. Karamargin, told the Washington Examiner. “What they’re suggesting, that we take them down and make Arizona less safe, is a nonstarter.”
Over 11 days in August, construction crews installed stacks of shipping containers in the wall's gaps to block Mexican cartels from smuggling people and drugs into the country via Arizona.
The Interior Department’s Bureau of Reclamation on Oct. 13 ordered the shipping containers be cleared out because they violated U.S. law and were not approved to be placed on federal land.
Joe Biden canceled all border wall construction nationwide in January of last year. Since then, more than 3.6 million people have been arrested for illegal entry, and many thousands more have evaded Border Patrol and entered the U.S.
The Ducey administration said that it waited for Team Biden to fill in the gaps between wall projects. But, realizing by mid-2022 that wasn't going to happen, Arizona took matters into its own hands and plugged the gaps where nearly all illegals were crossing in the region.
Arizona slammed Bureau of Reclamation Regional Director Jacklynn Gould for what the state said was her office’s lack of knowledge about its claims that the federal government was in the process of filling in the gaps.
“As its sister agency, and a partner on the southwest border, the fact that the Bureau of Reclamation (BOR) does not 'know' whether a contract has been awarded to secure the southern border, let alone land under the control of your agency, is concerning,” Arizona Department of Emergency and Military Affairs Director of Emergency Management Allen Clark wrote in a letter shared with the Washington Examiner.
On Tuesday, Team Biden sent a generic letter to the state alerting officials of its intention to close four gaps in the border wall. Shelly Barnes, the environmental planning lead within the Border Patrol’s program management office directorate, said the government would use “temporary mesh fencing and mechanized bollard vehicle gates” in place of the shipping containers and that it would start in early 2023.
“They want us to take down shipping containers and leave gaps open for who knows how long so they can put up what sounds like a chain link fence,” Karamargin said. “They’re asking to take down something so they can do something that we’ve already done. What Arizona needs is a permanent solution.”
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