Arizona Governor Doug Ducey was charged last week with trespassing by the Biden administration. As Fox News reports, it's a dispute Ducey has been having with the central administration since last August, when the Republican governor installed 100 containers on the U.S.-Mexico border near Yuma. What was his objective? To fill in the gaps along the border.
The containers, placed in rows of two and with barbed wire on top, soon began to be a nuisance to the Biden administration. Federal officials ordered him to remove them two weeks ago, but the governor resisted. He sued and asked the courts to allow Arizona to keep them as a preemptive measure to fill in the gaps not covered by a wall. This request was denied.
However, Ducey refuses to remove the containers. For him, they represent a message: they are a form of protest against the U.S. government's failure to seek solutions to make the border a safer place, as he said in statements collected by AP:
Arizona did the job the federal government has failed to do — and we showed them just how quickly and efficiently the border can be made more secure — if you want to.
The Biden administration doesn’t approve
According to Fox News, Ducey's plan is to cover a ten-mile section of the border using more than 2,700 containers. However, the Biden administration continues to oppose it and is demanding that the Republican governor remove them, claiming that Arizona is encroaching on federal lands. The response came in the form of a letter that Jacklynn Gould, regional director for the Bureau of Reclamation’s Lower Colorado Basin, sent to the governor of Arizona:
The unauthorized placement of those containers constitutes a violation of federal law and is a trespass against the United States.
This reasoning, however, does not convince Douglas Nicholls, the Republican mayor of Yuma. He assured to Fox News that, in fact, the land belongs to the federal government, but someone has to do something:
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.
