President Joe Biden is bent on keeping the border between Mexico and the U.S. wide open. However, one border state won't budge on his radical request to further facilitate that.
Arizona is resisting the Biden administration's private pleas to tear down its temporary border wall, a letter obtained by the Washington Examiner reported. The U.S. government has promised to build a new barrier in its place in 2023 despite previously doing nothing about the problem.
The communications director for Arizona GOP Gov. Doug Ducey said Wednesday that the state will not dismantle its barrier. "The suggestion by any federal bureaucracy, that we take action to make the border easier to cross, is completely unacceptable," C.J. Karamargin told the publication Wednesday.
"Gov. Ducey takes the responsibility to protect Arizona very seriously — that's why we put up these containers," he added. "What they're suggesting, that we take them down and make Arizona less safe, is a nonstarter," Karamargin said.
The situation in Arizona became a full-blown crisis after Biden took office in January 2021. The newly-minted president unceremoniously stopped all construction on border walls while allowing some 3.6 million illegal immigrants to flood in unimpeded.
Consequently, any hope for the government to fill in gaps in Arizona's border wall had evaporated, forcing the Ducey administration to take matters into its own hands in August. In just 11 days, construction workers had plugged the leaks in the border wall along its border with Mexico using shipping containers.
Rather than rectify the situation, the Interior Department's Bureau of Reclamation ordered the containers moved off of federal land on Oct. 13. The feds promised to fix the sections left open by this, but the Grand Canyon State does not want to be left without a barrier against the Mexican drug cartels.
The federal government should solve this problem but has stood idly by as people cross the porous southern border. Now, it is attempting to cripple Arizona's own attempt at a defense.