President-elect Joe Biden has previously vowed to end construction on Donald Trump’s stupid border wall after he takes office next month, saying this past August that “[t]here will not be another foot of wall constructed in my administration.” In his immigration plan, Biden said he’d end the “national emergency” that the impeached president has used as a lousy excuse to build the damned thing.
But, a report from the Associated Press claims that the president-elect will be facing some “tough choices” when it comes to the wall, “with construction in full swing, billions of dollars in contracts at stake and his word on the line,” a tweet said. I’m really trying to figure out why it’ll be so hard, because it all seems pretty clear-cut to me: stop the construction, cancel the contracts, and knock the motherfucker down. See, what’s so tough about that?
Of course, those massive contracts are cited as a main concern, but the federal government has the power to end those. “Biden’s administration could exercise termination clauses in the contracts,” the AP report said. Yes, it could mean that the new administration will have to fork over additional fees that could go to useful things, like pandemic relief. But either we’re serious about ending construction on this racist abomination, or we’re not.
What many of folks would in fact like to see is the fucking thing come down, something that could happen under a favorable Supreme Court decision. “If Biden wins election next month, his administration could do the same,” USA Today reported last month. Guess what? We won, and by a massive margin of votes.
But even if we get our wildest wish and see fencing begin to be pulled down come noon on January 20, there’s already been—and continues to be—so much destruction. NPR reported last month that the administration is rushing to build more fencing before Biden is inaugurated, bulldozing mountains and roads even though it’s clear it doesn’t have enough time to complete the project. In fact, environmental activist Laiken Jordahl called it “destruction for destruction's sake.”
“The damage the border wall has inflicted in just the past year is incalculable,” Jordahl wrote in an op-ed in The New York Times last month. “Much of it will last forever. No amount of money could repay the O’odham and all Indigenous people of the borderlands for the sacred sites, cultural history and natural heritage that’s been destroyed. To right these wrongs, we must start somewhere. Tearing down the wall would be a good start.”
“Stopping the work could force crews to leave projects half-finished and abandon steel and concrete already purchased,” the AP also cites as a problem for Biden, but I think stopping construction dead in its tracks is just one of many, many reasons millions of people voted for Biden in the first place. Nor do these materials need to remain there, or remain unused! We also have to remember that the whole fucking thing has been illegitimately constructed from the start, with Trump unlawfully stealing billions from other areas of the government. Now it’s Biden’s turn to use the full force of the government to put an end to this racist project.
