On Tuesday, the Texas governor announced that the state would expand the barriers it erected along the border with Mexico. This comes despite a Supreme Court order to remove some of them.
Total defiance
On Sunday, Abbott wrote on X, “More National Guard & razor wire barriers are coming to the Texas border. We’re-doubling our efforts to expand the areas where we are denying illegal entry into Texas. Illegal immigration is now going down in Texas while increasing in CA & AZ.” [sic]
Specific area
The area receiving more troops and barriers is Eagle Pass. Abbott has been heavily criticized for refusing to permit federal border officials to enter the area.
Boasting online
“Migrant crossings fall sharply along Texas border, shifting to Arizona and California,” Abbott bragged on X. “Our stiff resistance is educating cartels not to mess with Texas. Texas will continue erecting more barriers & target more arrests to better secure the border.”
Deadly policy
Abbott’s border policies came under intense criticism in January when three migrants — two of them children — drowned in the Rio Grande at Eagle Pass. State officials did not allow federal agents to enter the area, which may have played a role in the deaths of the asylum seekers.
Order from above
On Jan 22, the Supreme Court issued a 5-4 ruling ordering Texas to allow federal agents to remove some razor wire placed along the border around Eagle Pass.
Total refusal
However, Abbott has loudly and furiously refused to obey the Supreme Court or federal authorities. He claimed Texas had a “constitutional authority to defend and protect itself” which “is the supreme law of the land and supersedes any federal statutes to the contrary.”
Fact check
In reality, as University of Texas School of Law professor Stephen Vladeck explained, “It’s pretty clear [that] under the Constitution, under our precedents, that immigration policy, control of the border really is ultimately in the federal government’s purview.”
Gaining support
Twenty-five Republican governors signed a letter supporting Abbott. Trump called on Republican states to send their National Guard troops to Texas, which some — including Florida and Indiana — have done.
Hypocrisy
However, Abbott and his Republican allies have been harshly criticized for publicly complaining about the border while working to kill Biden’s bipartisan border deal, which would have been the most extreme border security bill in decades.
Extremist behavior
“Abbott taking matters into his own hands,” Wesley Leckrone, a political scientist, explained, “talk in GOP circles of rejecting the Supreme Court’s ruling, and the optics of other red states sending National Guard troops into Texas all play into Biden’s narrative of Trump and the GOP’s march toward authoritarianism and the rejection of the rule of law.”
Conflicting attitudes
In 2023, after unauthorized migration sharply declined, the Pew Research Center polled Americans on their opinion of how the government was handling the border. Almost three-quarters believed the government was doing a bad job — an increase from 2019 and 2021, when encounters were higher.
Not happy
Many residents of Eagle Pass, however, are deeply unhappy with Abbott’s posturing. As white nationalists, including the “God’s Army” convoy, descended on the border, one resident said that she “felt unsafe just walking down the street in broad daylight” for the first time.
Appealing to extremists
Abbott’s rhetoric, which includes frequent use of terms like “invasion” and “holding the line,” “combined with Texas’s standoff with the federal government, is applauded by the same far-right movements that engage in hate crimes, domestic terrorism, were prominent at the January 6 insurrection,” an expert at the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism explained.
Increasing violence
“Abbott and other GOP leaders use the same tropes about migrants as white-power groups and frequently echo the ‘great replacement theory,’ which imagines the engineered replacement of White people in western societies,” an investigation in the Washington Post explained. “Hate trackers say violent movements have wasted little time in seizing on the political opening.”
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