Governor Greg Abbott’s feud with US President Joe Biden might entertain voters, but it won’t stem the tide of illegal migrants
By Tony Cox, a US journalist who has written or edited for Bloomberg and several major daily newspapers.
By Tony Cox, a US journalist who has written or edited for Bloomberg and several major daily newspapers.
National Guard soldiers stand guard on the banks of the Rio Grande river at Shelby Park on January 12, 2024 in Eagle Pass, Texas. © BRANDON BELL / GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA / GETTY IMAGES VIA AFP
Many of the beleaguered Americans who have watched their country be overrun for decades by never-ending streams of illegal aliens were cheered up by the latest salvo in Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s border-security feud with US President Joe Biden.
It’s easy to see why. Watching the Biden administration wave in record flows of lawless migrants – with total disregard for the harms caused to American citizens – is painful, so seeing Abbott defy the federal government is soothing. Two days after the US Supreme Court upheld the federal government’s right to dismantle border barriers installed by Texas National Guard soldiers, the governor declared on Wednesday that the state’s right to self-defense “supersedes” all federal laws, so he will continue fighting the “invasion.”
The Republican governor insisted that because the Biden administration shirked its constitutional duty to defend US states against foreign invaders, Texas is filling the void to protect its own citizens. Therefore, the state troops will keep working to block the immigrant influx, regardless of what the Supreme Court says.
Republican politicians – such as US Representatives Clay Higgins and Chip Roy, Senator Ted Cruz, and Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders – cheered on Abbott’s move. Former President Donald Trump, the leading Republican candidate to face Biden in this year’s presidential election, said Texas “must be given full support to repel the invasion.” He encouraged other governors to deploy their National Guard troops to help secure the border.
Sadly, the importation of millions of illegal aliens will continue to be forced on Americans, regardless of political stunts and regardless of whether the red team or the blue team is in charge. The trend has certainly gotten far worse under Biden, but Republicans have campaigned on the immigration issue for decades without taking the obvious steps needed to secure the border.
Case in point: Republicans controlled both houses of Congress when Trump took office in 2017, but the border wall that he promised was never built. There were no mass deportations of illegal aliens. Nor were there mass arrests of the traitorous employers who enable the influx by hiring people who can’t legally work in the US. Taxpayers were forced to continue footing the bill, as always.
That’s the ruling-class expectation for law-abiding citizens: Work hard and shut up while paying for us to undercut your wages and make your communities more crowded and less safe. Those who whimper too loudly are branded with the scarlet R-word (racist).
That same ruling class will make sure that Abbott’s border maneuverings have no significant effect. The Biden administration has fought much harder to block the state’s security measures than to police the border. Despite claiming that it doesn’t have enough border agents to secure the border, the administration had plenty of manpower to rip out the concertina wire that Texas troops were using to seal off high-traffic crossing points. When Texas put floating barriers in the Rio Grande River, the administration sued the state, claiming that Abbott was endangering migrants.
The Texas National Guard has seized control of a park at a key crossing point, but Biden can simply federalize those troops to get his way, as some Democrat politicians have already suggested. He wants to ensure that Border Patrol agents can do their important work of removing the state barriers to avoid inconveniencing the immigrants who flout US law.
Biden has greased the invasion skids like no president before him. Nearly 2.48 million illegal aliens were encountered by Border Patrol agents in the government’s latest fiscal year, which ended on September 30, and there was an all-time high of more than 300,000 last month alone.
Those who are ‘encountered’ aren’t turned back. The administration has released millions of illegal immigrants and bogus ‘asylum seekers’ into the country, ostensibly to await court hearings. Those hearings won’t happen for years, or even decades, and many immigrants will simply skip them when their court date finally arrives. Millions more have come through the border as ‘gotaways’, without being ‘processed’ by the Border Patrol.
It’s no coincidence that the surge in border traffic has been accompanied by increases in child trafficking and drug trafficking. Fentanyl transported across the border by drug cartels is killing thousands of Americans every month. More than 112,000 Americans died from drug overdoses between May 2022 and May 2023, primarily from fentanyl and other synthetic opioids. At the same time, there has been a 56-fold increase in the number of Border Patrol encounters with people who had been flagged on the US terrorist watch list.
The situation has gotten so bad that Americans of all political stripes and demographic categories see it as not merely a crisis, but an invasion. A Rasmussen Reports poll released this month showed that nearly two-thirds of US voters – including 55% of Democrats – agree that the country is under invasion.
But even if Biden allows the Texas border initiative to continue, rather than forcibly breaking it up, the criminals who traffic immigrants to the US will have plenty of soft pathways still available to exploit. Many of the immigrants detained by Texas troops are reportedly just being turned over to the Border Patrol.
Abbott also has made headlines by sending busloads of illegal immigrants to Democrat-controlled cities, such as New York and Chicago. Republicans have celebrated this tactic, as it forces pro-immigration virtue signalers to get a real taste of the crisis. New York Mayor Eric Adams was so flustered that he claimed the migrant influx will “destroy” America’s largest city.
The problem is, although this is fun to watch, it’s a distraction from the fact that the border remains wide open, and shifting the consequences around the country isn’t a victory. Confuse, divide, conquer. Lather, rinse, repeat.
In any case, Texas has no legal authority to deport the millions of illegal aliens coming across the border or those already in the state. And if it did have the power to do so? Both major political parties have already demonstrated that they have no intention of removing the cheap labor favored by their donors.
The Texas-Washington DC tensions may be eased if Biden is able to cut a deal with Republican lawmakers to beef up border security. He’s seeking to trade some tough-sounding (but ineffectual) immigration measures to get Republicans to approve more than $60 billion in additional funding for another disastrous Washington project: The Ukraine proxy war.
The longer-term goal is to finally achieve the ruling-class dream of “comprehensive immigration reform,” which basically means amnesty for millions of illegal aliens already here and some fake gestures on border security.
Law-abiding citizens will continue to suffer the consequences and incur the costs, and their votes will be disenfranchised over time. Short of armed rebellion or the secession of border states (no chance), the show will go on.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
