The Biden administration asked Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey to remove shipping containers on the Mexico border as the southern border crisis continues.
Ducey, a Republican, started placing containers along the Mexico border earlier this summer when the Department of Homeland Security failed to finish erecting the barrier and decided to fill in the border gaps in Arizona.
BREAKING: #BNNUS Reports.
— Gurbaksh Singh Chahal (@gchahal) October 31, 2022
Biden Administration accuses Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey of trespassing as the Republican governor makes efforts to fill gaps along the US-Mexico border with shipping containers. #politics #us pic.twitter.com/s36tYv2Ri9
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation then informed state officials last week that using the containers near the Yuma area violates federal law.
Arizona’s Department of Emergency and Military Affairs fired back at the Bureau of Reclamation with its own letter on Tuesday, saying: “The containers will remain in place until specific details regarding construction are provided.”
Ducey has rejected the White House’s calls to remove the containers and doubled down on them, announcing that he would install more shipping containers to plug the gaps in the border wall erected by former President Donald Trump.
A spokesperson for Ducey said the governor is weighing his options and questioned the federal government’s sense of urgency in dealing with the situation.
“It took the feds since August to write a letter?” Ducey Communications Director C.J. Karamargin told the Washington Examiner on Tuesday. ”If this is any indication of their sense of urgency, then perhaps that explains the problem we’re having.”
According to the Customs and Border Protection, the number of migrant encounters this fiscal year has already reached over 2 million, breaching the already-historic 1.7 million encounters last year.
The U.S. has been seeing massive migrant numbers since the Biden administration announced that it would be lifting “Title 42,” a controversial border policy implemented by Trump back in March 2020 that allowed the border agency to turn migrants away.
Trump directed blame toward President Joe Biden for the massive influx of illegal immigrants in the country.
“Since the end of the Trump administration, the drug cartels have seen their revenues skyrocket by an astounding 2,500%,” the ex-president told the crowd at a rally in Robstown, Texas, last month. “A lot of the crimes that we have — the robberies and all of the different things — they are caused by drugs.”
