Psaki hits out at Trump for spending $15bn on border wall that ‘was never going to work’

Biden administration now facing bipartisan pressure to keep Title 42 in place

White House press secretary Jen Psaki slammed former president Donald Trump’s approach to managing the US immigration system on Monday in response to questioning about the situation the Biden administration is facing at the southern border today.

Under repeated questions about the death of a National Guardsman who drowned last week while attempting to assist migrants in the treacherous Rio Grande, Ms Psaki blamed the Trump White House for spending four years in power without passing meaningful immigration reform legislation through Congress.

“Well, I would just say — if we just dial it back a few years to, kind of, what we inherited here — the former president invested billions of dollars in a border wall that was never going to work or be effective, instead of working towards comprehensive immigration reform,” Ms Psaki said on Monday.

“As part of the President’s proposal he put forward on his first day in office, he proposed investing in smarter security at the border — something he’d be happy to work with governors on...[W]e’re open to having that conversation whenever they’re ready to do that,” the White House spokeswoman added.

Her remarks are likely to infuriate Republican state leaders who have blamed the Biden administration for inaction on the issue as the overwhelmed US immigration system struggles to respond to continued to historic levels of northward migration driven by continued instability in Central America.

Just around $15bn was spent by the federal government on the construction of a border wall between 2017-2021.

In one moment last year that was politically damaging for the Biden adminsitration, more than 10,000 Haitian migrants arrived near Del Rio, Texas after crossing the border and set up a tent city that became a rallying cry for conservative immigration hawks. The encampment was eventually dispersed and all migrants were either deported or admitted under a limited number of asylum claims, but the images of the scale of the group became a point of anger for the right. Conversely, the treatment of migrants in the area by Department of Homeland Security officials enraged the left and led to claims of racism from Democrats.

The two parties are deeply divided on the issue of immigration and the Senate remains evenly divided, 50-50, between Democrats and Republicans meaning that the likelihood of legislation being passed remains slim.

A growing number of Democrats and Republicans both are calling for the administration to extend Title 42, a CDC directive that allowed DHS to turn away migrants at the border due to concerns about Covid-19, as it was an effective legal tool for blunting the number of migrants admitted into the US.