President Biden has pledged that there will “not be another foot” of the Trump border wall built. But his first weeks in office demand more than stopping construction of the towering barricade that has fueled humanitarian crises and ravaged the desert environment.
Border towns from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Coast have suffered disproportionately, sacrificed to policies that ignore lives and livelihoods in favor of a dubious 450-mile-long monument to presidential hubris.
Over the last four years, border residents have experienced systematic discrimination and environmental destruction. Absent intervention, much of the damage to communities on both sides of the border will be long-lasting.
The insults include extreme rates of Covid-19 infection because of botched state and federal responses to the pandemic, the loss of thousands of agricultural jobs as a result of tariff wars and the intertwined catastrophes of drought, fire and flood, which the Trump administration’s hostile climate policies most likely worsened.
