(PresidentialHill.com)- The Biden administration is really going out on a limb with its latest accusation against a Republican-led state.
This week, the White House accused Governor Doug Ducey of Arizona of trespassing. The reasoning behind it was that the governor said last week that he’d send crews to install shipping containers for spots of its southern border with Mexico where there were gaps that weren’t covered by fencing or a wall.
Ducey had already placed some shipping containers at locations in southwestern Arizona, and federal officials had ordered him to remove them. The governor obviously didn’t back down from this plan, though, instead announcing a further expansion of the effort.
Ducey actually sued the federal government, petitioning the court system to allow his state to keep the 100 shipping containers in their place located near Yuma. The containers are stacked one on top of the other in a row, and barbed wire is placed on top of them.
Those containers were placed there back in August to fill the gaps in Arizona’s border protection with Mexico. Ducey said at the time that he was taking action because of “the inaction of the Biden administration in stopping migrants from entering the state from Mexico.”
Ducey’s original plan was to use in excess of 2,700 shipping containers to cover a stretch of Arizona’s border that measures about 10 miles long. Each of the shipping containers is roughly 60 feet long.
The Biden administration is claiming that in putting these containers there, Ducey and the state of Arizona is trespassing on land owned by the federal government.
Jacklynn Gould recently sent a letter to Arizona about the matter. She serves as the regional director of the Bureau of Reclamation’s Lower Colorado Basin. That letter reads:
“The unauthorized placement of those containers constitutes a violation of federal law and is a trespass against the United States. That trespass is harming federal lands and resources and impeding Reclamation’s ability to perform its mission.”
Reclamation sits under the federal Department of Interior. In her letter, Gould claims that the Department of Homeland Security awarded her group a contract to close gaps near the Morelos Dam, which is the project she was referring to.
She also wrote that she believes they will be given another contract to fill two additional gaps in the border within that region.
Ducey isn’t the only Republican official who believes the containers are a good idea. Douglas Nicholls, the mayor of Yuma, told Fox News in a recent interview:
“They say this is federal land, and it is, but it would be trespassing supposedly to put these containers on there. Well, my contention is that 300,000 people that have come through this year alone, they’ve been trespassing, and I don’t remember seeing a letter going out to anybody to try to stop any of that.”
Since Ducey’s project started two months ago, Arizona filled roughly 3,900 feet of the border that was previously open. It took 130 shipping containers to fill that gap, and it took 11 days to place them there.
