The former chief of the Border Patrol Rodney Scott outlined this week that the Biden administration is still paying contractors who were supposed to build the border wall up to $5 million per day even though all construction has been halted.
Scott also warned that an unprecedented number of illegal immigrants are being allowed to pour over the border, with over 90% remaining undocumented.
Speaking to Fox News anchor Bret Baier, Scott pointed out that a presidential proclamation from January to pause construction on the border barrier for 60 days expired months ago, yet contractors are still being paid for doing nothing.
“We’re supposed to do an in depth study and then come up with a plan going forward,” Scott said, adding “As Border Patrol did its part, everything, that was done within about two weeks, several briefings later, there really had not been any decisions made, it went well beyond the 60 days. 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 DOD and DHS.”
“Wait, $5 million a day to not build the wall?” a stunned Baier questioned.
“To not build a wall,” Scott replied.
He continued, “There are stacks and stacks of border wall panels, there’s hundreds of miles of fiber optic cabling, there’s hundreds of cameras that were being installed with that, that are just sitting, there’s no action being taken.”
“We’re not building more wall. There’s no conversation. There’s no there’s no adult dialogue, if you will,” Scott further urged, adding “It’s just a black and white decision. The administration said we’re not doing it. So we’re not doing it. That money is just trickling away to those contractors for not doing work each day.”
On the surge of illegals at the border, Scott said the Biden administration is purposefully “choosing not to take simple, common-sense steps to secure the border.”
“I personally participated in some of the transition meetings; my staff participated in all of the transition meetings; we made it very clear that if we dropped all the initiatives that had 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 further proclaimed.
“The result of that is the message goes out, and then instead of having a couple hundred encounters a day, we quickly went up to about 6,000 encounters a day,” Scott urged.
The U.S. has had a massive surge in immigration this year, with as many as 1.5 million newcomers and a record 46.2 million foreign-born people, according to a report for the Center for Immigration Studies.
After a deep trough last year, likely because of the COVID-19 pandemic and the travel and migration restrictions imposed to control the spread, the flow of people rebounded around the time President Biden was elected.
In numbers never seen before, they are coming legally through airports and land border crossings and illegally across the Rio Grande and remote regions of Arizona and California.
“There was pent-up demand for legal immigration, and illegal immigration has exploded in one of the greatest surges, if not the greatest, we’ve ever seen,” said Steven A. Camarota, the demographer who was the chief author of the report. “It’s driving the numbers up and up and up.”
As it stands, 14.2% of the U.S. population is foreign-born, or 1 out of every 7 people. That is the highest rate of immigrants in the population since 1910, when the number was 14.7%. At current trends, the government says, the U.S. will break that record well before the end of this decade.
Those numbers are even starker given the reversal of trends.
The data showed a drop of 1.2 million immigrants from February to September 2020, likely the result of coronavirus restrictions blocking new entrants, even as outmigration continued. That left the population of the foreign-born — the Census Bureau’s term — at 43.8 million.
It was up to 45 million by January and marched steadily to the current 46.2 million total shown for last month.
In the year after President Trump’s election, the immigrant population flattened.
States say contractor requirement violates Constitution
The Biden administration’s mandate for federal contractors’ employees to be vaccinated will be halted nationwide, amid a slew of challenges from states that say the president overstepped his authority in requiring the Covid-19 shots.
Led by Georgia, the seven states that challenged the mandate set to take effect on Jan. 4 are likely to succeed in their lawsuits against the administration’s order, U.S. District Court Judge R. Stan Baker of the Southern District of Georgia said in an order issued Tuesday.
The Biden administration mandate applies to roughly a quarter of the U.S. workforce and affects companies that do business with the federal government, including Lockheed Martin Corp., Microsoft Corp., Alphabet Inc.‘s Google, and General Motors Co.
Baker’s order follows a Kentucky federal judge’s grant last week of a preliminary injunction in a lawsuit involving Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio. Baker echoed what his Kentucky counterpart said, that blocking the mandate didn’t indicate that the vaccine wouldn’t be effective to stopping the spread of Covid-19, but rather that Biden didn’t have the power to issue such an executive order.
Representatives from Georgia universities testified during an injunction hearing earlier this month, arguing that implementation of the mandate would be expensive, onerous, and cost them valuable employees who haven’t yet presented proof of vaccination. Those schools receive millions from the federal government.
The court found that the states could likely prove that Congress didn’t clearly authorize the president to issue the mandate, and that it “goes far beyond addressing administrative and management issues in order to promote efficiency and economy in procurement and contracting.” The 2017 nominee of President Donald Trump said, instead, the executive order works as a “regulation of public health.”
Neither the lawyers representing the state coalition nor the U.S. government immediately responded to emailed requests for comment.
Idaho Gov. Brad Little cheered Tuesday’s ruling in a statement. The state is part of the Georgia-led contractor mandate challenge, as well as lawsuits against the Occupational Safety and Hazard Administration’s shot-or-test emergency regulation for large U.S. businesses, and another inoculation rule for healthcare workers.
“Yet another one of President Biden’s vaccine mandates have been temporarily shut down because the states—including Idaho—took a stand against his unprecedented government overreach into Americans’ lives and businesses,” Little said in the statement. “All three mandates are now completely stalled. We will continue to press forward in our fight against the federal government’s bad policies.”
