The U.S. government does not want to build new sections of wall on its border with Mexico, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said on Friday, expressing doubt that the planned construction would be carried out.
“It’s pure publicity,” Lopez Obrador said in a regular morning press conference after the Biden administration announced it would build additional sections of border wall, carrying forward a signature policy of the Trump administration.
A high-ranking delegation of U.S. officials met Thursday with their Mexican counterparts, among them U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
“They don’t want to (build more sections of the wall), that’s what they told us,” Lopez Obrador said.
U.S. President Joe Biden said on Thursday that the funds allocated for the construction were appropriated by Congress and that he could not, by law, redirect the money.
Biden, when he took office in 2021, pledged that “no more American taxpayer dollars be diverted to construct a border wall.”
Mexico’s president added that in the meetings the day before, the Mexican delegation expressed that Mexico “does not believe (additional border wall construction) to be the answer to the migration problem.”
“We’ve always spoken about tending to the root causes,” Lopez Obrador said.
“As of early August 2023, Border Patrol had encountered over 245,000 such entrants attempting to enter the United States between ports of entry in the Rio Grande Valley Sector in Fiscal Year 2023,” DHS Secretary Alejandro Majorkas’s office said in a notification published Thursday in the Federal Registry.
“There is presently an acute and immediate need to construct physical barriers and roads in the vicinity of the border of the United States in order to prevent unlawful entries into the United States in the project areas pursuant to [federal law].”
