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- Texas GOP Gov. Greg Abbott promised Thursday to keep building Trump's border wall.
- President Joe Biden has canceled all construction on it.
- Abbott, who has declared a disaster at the Texan border, is feuding with Biden over the border.
- See more stories on Insider's business page.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott promised Thursday to build a wall along the state's border with Mexico, the beloved but unrealized policy of President Donald Trump, local reports say.
The pledge directly contradicts President Joe Biden's decision to cancel construction of the border wall that was given vast funding during the Trump years.
Speaking at a press conference on border security in Del Rio, the Republican governor released few details for the project, promising more to follow next week, The Texas Tribune reported.
He did outline a plan to spend $1 billion on border security, and to set up a task force on the border, per the Tribune.
Abbott's promise is another salvo in an ongoing feud with the White House on border security.
Biden signed an executive order to halt construction of the border wall on his first day in office. In April, he canceled all construction contracts that were using military funding repurposed by Trump.
Numbers of people attempting to cross the border from Mexico - including thousands of unaccompanied children - rose steeply soon after Biden took office, drawing intense criticism from the GOP.
Biden has attributed the numbers to extreme circumstances in the countries the migrants are coming from, and argued that Trump dismantled much of the infrastructure that had existed to process people properly.
At the press conference, Abbott framed the situation as a "crisis" that is "plaguing the farmers, the ranchers, the residents of the entire border region."
His new initiatives "will help all of us to work on ways to stem the flow of unlawful immigration and to stem the flow of illegal contraband," Abbott said, according to the Tribune.
On June 1, he issued a disaster declaration over border security, and ordered state childcare regulators to remove the licenses of federal facilities housing undocumented migrant children, The Dallas Morning News reported. Biden's DOJ is threatening to sue over that move.
Abbott's latest announcement comes soon after former GOP state Sen. Don Huffines announced himself as a challenger to Abbott - and included a pledge to continue building the wall.
"When I am governor, we will finish building the wall. We will completely shut down the border until the crisis is solved and eliminate all taxpayer-funded subsidies to illegal aliens," Huffines said in a June 2 tweet.
from Business Insider https://ift.tt/3vgBnlj
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