In late September, the Biden administration’s Department of Homeland Security awarded a $229 million contract for border wall construction in Starr County to SLSCO Ltd., a contractor that also built wall for the Trump administration and isarea in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley with a few towns abutting the river, currently hosts just a few short stretches of border fencing. SLSCO is a Galveston-based firm run by a family of GOP political donors.
“Clearly DHS under the Biden administration has no more respect for border residents than it did under the Trump administration,” said Scott Nicol, a longtime anti-wall activist and researcher and board member of the Valley-based Friends of the Wildlife Corridor, upon learning of the contract. “Biden should use the remaining funds to mitigate some of the damage border walls have already done, not waste hundreds of millions of dollars to inflict more destruction.
Without the waiver, DHS would have to comply with more rigorous environmental and historical preservation requirements and be subject to lawsuits over this compliance—which anti-wall advocates say is exactly how things should go.
Dinah Bear, an environmental lawyer who served on the President’s Council on Environmental Quality from the 1980s through the 2000s, agreed on the waiver question. “There is absolutely no legal reason on the face of the earth that they had to issue the waivers,” she told the.