Abbott Defies Federal Authority to Fight Illegal Immigration

Members of the U.S. Border Patrol Search, Trauma, and Rescue (BORSTAR) team pursue a group of illegal aliens as they cross through the dense brush while on patrol near Eagle Pass, Texas, June 19, 2019. As Border Patrol agents are tasked to conduct intake and processing of the recent surge in migrant arrivals at the border, members of BORSTAR have been assisting in pursuing illegal aliens afield. CBP photo by Glenn Fawcett.

In Texas, ground-zero for Joe Biden’s broken border policies, Governor Greg Abbott is defying federal authority in an attempt to fight illegal immigration. In The Spectator, Lionel Shriver explains that it’s a civil war in microcosm. He writes:

Pundits these days often warn that America may be on the brink of civil war. Finally, they’re right — except that in tiny Eagle Pass, Texas, forget being on the brink. In microcosm, civil war is already under way.

Once again playing immigration hardball, last week the Texas governor Greg Abbott, the vile, heartless Republican whose voodoo doll progressive Democrats poke pins in, sent the Texas National Guard to assume control of an Eagle Pass park used to process migrants and additional lands along the Mexican border. In so doing, the state militia is actively blocking the US Border Patrol from policing several miles along the banks of the Rio Grande. The intention, according to the Texas Military Department, is to block “organizations that perpetuate illegal immigrant crossings.” Those organizations would seem to include the federal government.

Now, Fort Sumter this is not. It’s hard to see conflicting jurisdiction over a park escalating into a four-year clash between rebel states and DC that ends with 620,000 American dead. Nevertheless, Abbott’s defiance of federal authority further ramps up the antagonism between a governor infuriated by federal inaction on what has become a siege of foreigners in his state and the Biden administration, whose relative passivity in the face of proliferating guests of the nation makes the president, in addiction terms, an “enabler.”

What led to the deaths near that occupied park last weekend is disputed, but Homeland Security is clearly attempting to weaponize the drownings of three migrants, two of them children, as a demonstration that Abbott’s cavalier policies endanger human life. Texas has passed a bill making illegal immigration into its territory a state crime, a law on which the feds are asking the courts to slap an injunction before it takes effect in March. Texas has floated buoys in the Rio Grande to obstruct migrants refining their aquatic skills, which the Biden administration has sued to remove. Texas has strung concertina wire in great billows on the American side of the river, which the White House is also seeking permission from the court to cut. After all, these metallic tumbleweeds seem unfriendly.

But why are the Texas state government and the White House on opposing sides? Why wouldn’t both parties have a vested interest in controlling this chaos? Because, constitutionally, only the federal government may fail to enforce its own immigration laws.

You can understand the desperation on the ground. Under normal circumstances, Eagle Pass has a population of 29,000. Last December, 14,000 migrants arrived in this hamlet in a single day — swelling the population by 50 percent in twenty-four hours. Use your imagination. Many of these arrivals are injured or unwell; the town’s small, beleaguered fire department gets around fifty calls per day, two-thirds of them regarding migrants in distress and had to buy a fifth ambulance to handle the extra demand. All these incomers need to relieve themselves, and may not, er, find a convenient portacabin before they do so. They leave behind mountains of litter and even abandoned pets. They’re thirsty and they’re hungry. They’re usually broke and rarely speak English. But the moment they set foot in your town, their problems become your problems: their disabilities, their mental illnesses, their lawbreaking, their drug-taking, their domestic abuse, their fights with one another, their gang affiliations, their lack of employable skills, their pregnancies or kidney dialysis, their children’s learning shortfalls or behavioral issues. Eagle Pass has yet to receive any federal aid to compensate the townspeople for a crisis not of their making.

Read more here.