The new $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill contains billions of dollars to upgrade border crossings — but no money at all for the southern border wall, which President Joe Biden abandoned, despite an ongoing surge of illegal migration.
The massive, 2,700-page draft bill was obtained by Breitbart News and published exclusively on Sunday evening.
The proposed deal allocates $3.4 billion for “for construction and acquisition, and repairs and alterations of border stations and land ports of entry,” including $2.5 billion for “projects on the U.S. Customs and Border Protection five-year plan.” (The five-year plan released in December 2020 included the wall, but President Biden halted it in January.)
In addition, the infrastructure deal allocates hundreds of millions of dollars to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, under the Department of Homeland Security, but none of it for a border wall. $330 million is budgeted for “furniture, fixtures, and equipment for the land ports of entry modernized with funding provided” elsewhere in the bill, as above; and $100 million is provided for “for land port of entry construction, modernization, and sustainment.”
Republicans have said that the estimated cost of not building the border wall has been $2 billion, given the expense that the Biden administration has incurred to pay military contractors to guard unused building materials at the border.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) told Breitbart News Sunday that Republicans could try to amend the infrastructure bill to make the inclusion of a border wall a condition for passage, along with priorities like the Keystone XL pipeline.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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