Many legal experts—even conservative ones—believe the executive order to be unconstitutional. Only the federal government can make immigration policy and declare an “invasion.”
But Abbott may have bigger fish to fry. He may be setting up for a challenge to the statute that prevents states like Texas from enforcing their own immigration laws.
Abbott has poured billions of dollars into immigration enforcement in Texas. He has sent thousands of National Guard troops and directed Department of Public Safety officers to help patrol and arrest illegal aliens in southern Texas. He has bused illegals to Washington, D.C., closed bridges into Mexico, and challenged the Biden administration in court trying to get them to toughen their enforcement.
The governor has repeatedly accused the Biden administration of encouraging the increasing numbers of immigrants taking risks and putting their lives in the hands of smugglers to reach Texas and the broader United States. He went after the president after San Antonio law enforcement officers found dozens of dead and dying migrants abandoned inside a sweltering tractor-trailer last month.
“While President Biden refuses to do his job and enforce immigration laws enacted by Congress, the state of Texas is once again stepping up and taking unprecedented action to protect Americans and secure our southern border,” Abbott said in a statement. “As the challenges on the border continue to increase, Texas will continue to take action to address those challenges caused by the Biden administration.”
Advocates for illegal aliens say Abbott is wildly overstepping his authority and is violating the illegal aliens’ civil rights.
“It’s discriminatory and violates civil rights,” said Laura Peña, legal director for the Texas Civil Rights Project’s Beyond Borders program. “This is just another escalation of what is an underlying drumbeat of racism and xenophobia that Abbott has been fomenting and can have deadly consequences.”
But at least one Texas jurisdiction has already begun taking matters into its own hands. Kinney County, a rural South Texas ranching community along the Rio Grande, was one of the first local governments to declare an emergency over the “border crisis” and has become the focal point of a far-right campaign to push the state further border security offensive. Amplification of the county’s campaign has attracted attention from across conservative media.
It’s ridiculously simple: We either have defensible, internationally recognized borders or we don’t. If we don’t, we can tell border patrol agents to go home and find another career—learn to code maybe.
If we do, then we have to secure the border and allow people to enter the United States legally, and in an orderly fashion, only after being vetted—just like any other nation on earth.
Life sucks for about 90 percent of the people who live on planet earth. Poverty, war, violence, disease—most of the planet is a hellhole of pestilence and misery.
Wouldn’t it be great if they could all move to the U.S. and be safe, and well-fed, get a good job, find love, marry, have kids, and have the government take care of them all their lives?
It might be good for them. But what about the rest of us? The open-borders advocates who think the answer to failed countries in Central America and elsewhere is to relocate them to America don’t care about you—white, black, brown, yellow, red, whatever your color or religion. They want to pretend it’s “racist” to oppose allowing millions of people to move here. It’s simply common sense.
We have an absolute right to determine who comes into the United States and who can’t. The open-borders hysterics want to end that right—at least for the United States. We must stop them to maintain some semblance of a livable world for ourselves and our children.