Joe Biden’s $2.7 million vacation home in the North Shores community of Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, is now surrounded by tall white fencing, broken up by gray stone pillars, The Daily Mail reports.
The front of the property has a half-wall of gray stone and an opening for cars to enter the driveway.
The construction, which began last week, is being done for privacy and has a price tag of nearly $500,000.
The construction comes as the Biden administration continues to put an end to Arizona’s efforts to set up double-stacked metal shipping containers along the border to fill gaps in the wall and help quell illegal migration amid a historic surge over the last two years.
Those containers eased the strain on Border Patrol in the state, according to Hank Auza, a local fifth-generation farmer who has multiple fields by the Morelos Dam, where the containers were removed.
“It helped funnel the people to a certain location to where then the Border Patrol could manage them easier,” Auza said. “This administration, to me, it seems like they want this to happen. And for what reason? I do not know.”
“It was working,” said Alex Muller, president of Pasquinelli Produce Company. “It wasn’t bothering the farmers. It wasn’t bothering anybody that lives on the border because it doesn’t affect them. And they’re gone. In one day.”
The construction of Biden’s beach home wall began in 2021 when the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) awarded a contract for additional security barriers.
At the time, Ohio Republican Representative Jim Jordan questioned the construction, tweeting, “So, walls work at Joe Biden’s beach house, but not the southern border?”
The contract was given to Turnstone Holdings, LLC and has a final cost of $490,324, which is a nearly $34,000 increase from the original contract.
Because it’s a government contract, taxpayers will foot the bill for “purchase and installation of security fencing,” according to The Daily Mail.
The construction is expected to continue through the summer this year and wrap in September 2023.
On the day he took office in Jan 2021, Biden signed a proclamation that paused construction of the Trump administration’s border wall.
Since then, the number of migrants crossing the border has risen dramatically during Biden’s first two years in office, El Paso Times reports.
As he traveled to El Paso on Sunday, Joe Biden faced calls for help in tackling the migrant crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border, his first visit since taking the White House.
According to the El Paso Times, the city is currently the largest corridor for illegal crossings, largely as a result of Nicaraguans escaping repression, crime, and poverty in their home country. Last month, El Paso Mayor Oscar Leeser even declared a state of emergency in an effort to address the crisis.
As he exited Air Force One on Sunday, Biden was received by Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R), a staunch opponent of the Biden admin’s border practices.
Gov. Abbott handed Biden a letter dismissing his visit as a series of carefully staged photo ops and outlining five steps the administration could take to secure the border, including immediately resuming construction of the border wall in Texas, the Times notes.
Abbot said that Biden “needs to step up and take swift action, including reimbursing the state of Texas for the money we spent, and providing more resources for the federal government to do its job. Also, this is nothing but for show unless he begins to enforce the immigration laws that already exist in the United States of America, which are contained in the letter that I provided to the president today.”
The Texas governor urged Biden in the letter “to see the real chaos, what everybody here may already know, that there were thousands of migrants sleeping on the streets in El Paso that have been cleaned up in the past few days. I asked him to go see the areas where we have these massive migration crossings, and go visit with the people who own property and live on the border whose lives have been totally disrupted.”
Biden refused to take up Abbot’s recommendation.
“I asked the president to go down and see for himself where people are crossing the border illegally. Obviously, he did not do that,” Gov. Abbott said on Fox News’ “Faulkner Focus” on Monday.
