Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on April 1 said that Florida is willing to offer workers and state resources to help finish the construction of a wall along the U.S.–Mexico border.
“You need to have a wall because if you don’t, you’re always going to have an administration that doesn’t care about enforcing [border security],” DeSantis said at the Pennsylvania Leadership Conference in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He fit the comments into larger concerns about the weaponization of the federal government against Democrats’ political enemies.
President Joe Biden and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas have been accused by Republicans of refusing to enforce U.S. border laws for ideological reasons.
Currently, the United States is dealing with an unprecedented influx of illegal aliens along the southern border. Despite this, Biden has refused to carry on construction of former President Donald Trump’s border wall. The wall has already received federal funding. However, Biden’s opposition to the barrier means that the materials for the wall have been left lying along the border uncompleted.
DeSantis offered to allow the resources of his own state to be used to complete the project.
“Put us in, coach. Come on, Joe, we‘ll do it,” DeSantis said. “We’ll get it done.”
“What I tell people is we have some experience in construction in Florida,” DeSantis said, noting the prevalence of serious hurricanes there.
After Hurricane Ian made landfall in Florida in September 2022, a bridge to Pine Island, Florida, and Sanibel Island, Florida, was disabled. Locals were told that the bridge—the only thing connecting the islands to the mainland—would take over six months to repair.
“Those islands would have died” if it had taken six months to repair the bridge, DeSantis told the crowd.
At the time, DeSantis offered state resources to expedite the repair of the bridge despite its not being a state-owned and maintained bridge.
“I got my team together. And I said, ‘Listen, I don’t want any red tape. I don’t want any bureaucracy. I don’t want any of this stuff. I just want this stuff built. So let’s start now and get it done.’ And so we took over the job for Pine Island, and they feared that they were going to be out of a bridge for six months. We rebuilt the bridge in three days,” DeSantis said to a round of applause.
“And so I just raise that—I just raise that because I am willing to send my Florida people down to the southern border to build a wall,” DeSantis said.
Construction on the wall has stalled for political rather than logistical reasons.
While the wall and the materials to build it are already financed by the federal government, Biden has refused to allow construction to recommence on the barrier. Democrats have long claimed that Trump’s proposed wall is “xenophobic,” and have opposed its construction each step of the way.
Florida would not be able to make good on DeSantis’ offer without a green light from the Biden administration, which seems unlikely to be forthcoming as Biden prepares for a potential second run for the presidency.
