By Kaylee Greenlee
The Biden administration is spending around $3 million daily to not finish construction on the southern border wall, Republican Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford said Wednesday.
Around $2 billion in taxpayer dollars have been wasted paying Department of Defense (DOD) contractors not to build the border wall since Jan. 20, according to Lankford. Former President Donald Trump allocated $10 billion to the DOD for border wall construction. The Biden administration has spent taxpayer money on suspension and termination costs paid to contractors. (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: Top House Republican Calls for Legal Action from States Over Biden’s Border Wall Freeze)
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Joe Biden ended the federal emergency declaration at the border and stopped construction for a 60-day assessment of the need for additional barriers in January, though the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had not released the findings. The Biden administration also proposed canceling all border funds not already committed to projects in 2021 in the administration’s 2022 budget request to Congress.
“The Biden administration is setting money on fire while our border burns,” former CBP acting Commissioner and Heritage Foundation visiting fellow Mark Morgan and former DHS acting Deputy Chief of Staff and Heritage Foundation Senior Research Fellow Lora Ries said in a joint statement provided to the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“We have seen four months in a row of 173,000+ apprehensions at the border, a historic crisis, and yet this administration is actively refusing not only to do its constitutionally mandated job and secure the border, but to spend the money lawfully authorized by Congress for the purpose of securing the border,” Morgan and Ries added.
Border officials encountered nearly 190,000 migrants at the southern border in June, though 103,000 of those were rapidly expelled from the U.S. under Trump-era public health order Title 42, according to Customs and Border Protection (CBP). (RELATED: Biden mulls ending order allowing CBP to turn back migrant families amid COVID-19)
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