Texas has officially started building its own state-funded border wall, confirmed Gov. Greg Abbott on Friday.
Biden, the Republican governor added, also “refuses to enforce laws passed by Congress to secure the border and enforce immigration laws” and that “Texas is stepping up to do the federal government’s job.”
Earlier this year, amid near-record numbers of illegal immigrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, Abbott announced that he would try to secure funding for the state to construct its own border barrier after Biden signed an executive order that scrapped federal construction of the wall.
Texas’s wall construction, which would not obtain federal funding, has been favored by Abbott as a means of cracking down on illegal immigration and drug trafficking. In June, the governor started a private donation campaign that has raised about $54 million.
About 450 miles of the larger border barrier was constructed under President Donald Trump, who had championed the construction of the wall during his 2016 presidential campaign.
Abbott then asserted that the Texas wall will “cost less than it did for the Trump administration” because the “state of Texas owns [land] on the border itself” and will not have to acquire the land—as the federal government had to do under the Trump administration.
“There are property owners of massive acreage on the border who are fed up with Biden’s open border policies,” he continued, “and they are donating their land to Texas for us to be able to use that land for free to build a wall on their property.”
Since then, Biden’s order—as well as other immigration-related orders—has fueled Republican criticism of the president’s immigration policies, denouncing it as part of an “open borders” agenda.
Abbott’s office announced the governor will hold a news conference on Saturday, Dec. 18, in Rio Grande City to discuss the border wall construction.