Arizona Governor Doug Ducey is suing the Biden administration over a federal order to remove double-stacked shipping containers used to bridge the gap on the state border with Mexico.
In a news release announcing the lawsuit, Ducey, a Republican, said surrounding communities were overwhelmed with “illegal activity” because of Biden’s failure to secure the southern border.
“With this lawsuit, we stand against efforts by federal bureaucrats to reverse our progress. Security must not be neglected Arizona is going to do the job Joe Biden refused to do — secure our borders any way we can.We are not backing down.
The lawsuit names the United States Reclamation Service, the United States Forest Service, and their leader, Secretary of Agriculture Thomas J. Vilsack, as defendants.
Arizona government begins plugging gaps in border wall with shipping containers covered in razor wire
On Thursday, Ducey said “the Border Barrier Mission is working.” See containers stacked along the border. In August, he announced that the state had filled over a 4,000-foot gap in the border over the summer with shipping containers welded shut and covered with four feet of razor wire.
In the lawsuit, the governor said the federal government had begun building a border wall, but abandoned those efforts when Biden took office, leaving billions of dollars in unfinished work and leaving the state to continue building. He said he had no means or support for
The move to halt construction left “many gaps” in the border wall, making it easier for immigrants to enter the United States illegally, the complaint said.
“Indeed, the crisis at the southern border is marked by a massive and multifold influx of immigration, drugs and crime that continues to rise alongside federal inaction,” the lawsuit states. The gap in the border wall also created a humanitarian crisis within Arizona as immigrants flooded through the gap in the border wall into Arizona’s border towns and were quickly overwhelmed.”
The lawsuit comes days after the Bureau of Rehabilitation sent a letter to Arizona authorities ordering them to remove the containers and not install new ones. The morelos dam in Yuma, Arizona, said it wanted to prevent conflicts with two federal contracts already awarded and two still pending to fill gaps in a nearby border wall.
The Center for Biodiversity filed a separate objection to the shipping container, a notice of its intention to sue Ducey’s administration for what environmental groups said they planned to build more shipping containers along the border. have submitted.
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The group said the move would disrupt important jaguar and ocelot migration corridors.
Fox News’ Adam Shaw, Paul Best, and Associated Press contributed to this report.