As an immigration surge at the southern border continues, several Texas counties have announced that it is an “invasion” and are pressuring Gov. Greg Abbott to take measures to address the problems.
Officials from Uvalde, Kinney, Goliad and Terrell Counties called on Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to enforce federal immigration laws during a press conference on Tuesday, My San Antonio News reported.
“We want America to know that this is real,” Kinney County Judge Tully Shahan told reporters, Fox News reported.
“The Biden administration won’t do a thing about it. They could stop this thing this hour. They could stop it now. They don’t have the guts,” Shahan added.
Ken Cuccinelli, the former Director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, said that Gov. Abbott is the one who has the authority to repel an invasion.
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The governor could put “boots on the ground” in order to turn away immigrants and physically send them back across the border.
This is not the first time that border counties in Texas have asked Abbott for help in this manner.
But in April, Abbott declined to respond as if it were an invasion because he was concerned about legal consequences, My San Antonio News reported.
At Tuesday’s conference, officials said that action needed to be taken, since they are “under siege.”
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“It’s a nightmare,” Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin said at the conference. “It needs to stop. The federal government is not going to do it. We’re not doing these people any favors. We’re setting them up for failure. You’re turning them loose with nowhere to go, no jobs, and no work permit.”
Texas has seen a massive increase in immigration and Ken Paxton, the state’s attorney general, told Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in June that Texas needs its border barrier.
“A border barrier is critical to protecting Texans. The crisis on Texas’s southern border remains ongoing—illegal alien encounters at the southwest border are currently up to 1,295,900 for this fiscal year alone. The massive influx of illegal aliens has inflicted and continues to inflict serious costs on the State of Texas as well as Texans,” Paxton wrote in a letter.
“According to you, Mr. Secretary, the federal government was ‘on pace to encounter more individuals on the southwest border than we have in the last 20 years.’ That was in March 2021. By the end of 2021, the number of illegal alien crossings totaled almost 1.7 million. That was a 78 percent increase from the number of crossings in 2019 and a 279 percent increase from the number of crossings in 2020. Despite these huge increases of illegal alien crossings, a border barrier has not been built even though it was fully funded more than a year ago,” Paxton added.
Since the Biden administration took over the White House, there has been a considerable surge at the southern border.
Throughout 2021, millions of immigrants crossed into the U.S.
“U.S. Customs and Border Protection figures now show that more than 2 million unauthorized migrants came across the Mexican border in the calendar year and were apprehended or turned themselves in – in addition to those not stopped or detected,” Border Report wrote.
Along with the increasing numbers of immigrants flowing into the states, there have also been horrible tragedies and deaths as many have tried to cross the border.
Just last week, more than 50 people trying to come to the U.S. died from suffocation and dehydration in a semi-trailer outside of San Antonio.
“They were locked up inside a sweltering truck without water or air conditioning for at least four hours, according to the authorities, who also confirmed that it was the greatest migrant tragedy recorded on US soil,” El Pais reported.
In 2021, at least 650 migrants died crossing from Mexico to the U.S., the Texas Tribune reported.
That is more deaths than any other year since the International Organization for Migration began tracking the number in 2014.
Many small Texas border towns are not even equipped to handle the numbers of migrants and the deaths that they are encountering.
Goliad County Judge Mike Bennett noted that his county has only two stoplights and has a sheriff’s department that has two deputies on duty at any given time, Fox News reported.
“This is not a situation where we’re helping these migrants come across. This is a situation where many are dying along the way,” he said. “There’s a lot of carnage left in their wake.”
“Clearly, it’s the responsibility of the United States government to do this and clearly they’re not going to do a thing,” Bennett added.
Now, with the federal government doing very little to alleviate the pressure, Texans are now turning to Abbott and demanding that the situation be declared an invasion that needs to be addressed.
“The key here is you’ve got the first legal ruling that the southern border situation is an invasion,” Cuccinelli said. ” One, that’s obviously very significant, and two, it’s going to – as it should – put enormous pressure on Governor Abbott to adopt that position themselves and to respond accordingly.”
