Immigrant groups fault Biden for slow-walking reversal of Trump's border policies

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AUSTIN, Texas – Already taking heat from Gov. Greg Abbott and Republican leaders for a dramatic rise in unauthorized immigration, Democratic President Joe Biden is now under fire from Texas organizations in his own base that say he is moving too slowly to reverse Trump-era border policies.

A social media video of heavy equipment operating near a section of border barrier in Hidalgo County this month prompted anti-border-wall activists to warn that Biden appears to be slow-walking his campaign pledge to halt the multibillion-dollar project championed by the former president.

Biden "paused border wall construction, but today I filmed (wall-building contractor) SLSCO crews placing bollards on freshly poured levee-border walls in S TX," tweeted South Texas artist and wall opponent Scot Nicol in mid-July.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which oversees construction projects on federal land along the Texas-Mexico border, said the images showed maintenance work, not further wall-building.

"Activities shown in the video are of six-foot guardrail being installed to support levee repairs," the Corps said in a reply tweet.

Eduardo Martinez, who is part of the Rio Grande Valley No Border Wall Coalition, said he's not convinced.

“Guardrails or not, these are border walls, and we cannot be fooled into thinking they are repairs to the compromised levees the administration identified earlier this year," Martinez said. "Despite what administration officials want us to believe, border wall construction continues in South Texas."

More: Wall or no wall, many South Texans say more action needed to secure US-Mexico border

In June, the White House released what it called a "fact sheet" on its plans for border wall funding that was authorized during President Donald Trump's tenure. Included in the plans was canceling wall-related projects that were to be paid for with money diverted from the military and "ending wall expansion to the extent permitted by law."

In a news briefing in April, White House press secretary Jen Psaki noted that while Biden has put the brakes on the project, some work was continuing because Congress had specifically authorized funding for it. 

"It is paused," Psaki said at the time. "There is some limited construction that has been funded and allocated for, but it is otherwise paused."

Victoria DeFrancesco Soto, a fellow at the Center for Politics and Governance at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, said such nuance illustrates the complexities of the larger question of immigration and border security.

More: Fact check: Post misrepresents U.S.-Mexico border apprehensions under Trump, Biden

"There's so many moving parts, and you can't flip it on and off like a switch," DeFrancesco Soto said. "You can't just explain it in a sound bite."

Meanwhile, the immigrant rights group RAICES has signaled its impatience with the Biden administration for not pushing hard enough during its first six months in office to help asylum seekers and other immigrants being held in federal custody in facilities along the border.

The organization plans to take about two dozen people by bus from Texas to Washington, where they planned to arrive by Sunday. In a statement, RAICES said it plans "to hold the Biden administration and Democrats accountable for their decades-long promise to the immigrant community."

Biden, in a nationally televised town hall meeting last week on CNN, told an audience member that Vice President Kamala Harris was correct to tell people in Central America who hope to cross into the United States through Mexico that they should not make the journey without legal authorization.

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"They should not come," Biden said. "If you seek asylum in the United States, you can seek it from (your) country. You can seek it from an American Embassy. You can go in and seek and see whether or not you qualify."

The remark stands in contrast to RAICES' plan to tell Democratic leaders to "use every tool at their disposal to give undocumented people and asylum-seekers freedom from detention, freedom from deportation, freedom to work with dignity and a pathway to citizenship."

Almost since the day Biden took office and took the first step to unwind Trump's border policies, Abbott has been a persistent critic and has won national attention with his promise to build a state-funded barrier on the border. The governor hosted Trump at a section on the unfinished wall in late June and welcomed Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis at an event on the border this month.

Reuters reported in June that federal authorities have made more than 1 million arrests of unauthorized immigrants at the border since Oct. 1. But the Biden administration and others have pointed to poverty and political instability as driving the numbers more than the winding down of Trump's policies.

But with critics from progressive groups in Texas squeezing the president over border policy at the same time Republicans are hammering him, Biden is facing an even steeper uphill climb to boost Democrats' fortunes in the nation's largest Republican state.

"It's a difficult political problem for Biden, who is hoping to use Texas as a launching point to win over more Sunbelt states," said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston. "I think that Republicans are playing good offense on the border and have been playing well politically to their base and some swing voters."

John C. Moritz covers Texas government and politics for the USA Today Network in Austin. Contact him at jmoritz@gannett.com and follow him on Twitter @JohnnieMo.