(The Center Square) – The U.S. Department of Defense calling up an initial 2,500 National Guard troops from multiple states to be sent to the southern border. The move by the Biden administration is hypocritical, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott told The Center Square.
President Joe Biden has not responded to any of Abbott’s requests to visit the border, or secure the border, Abbott said in an interview on Tuesday.
“When you see the chaos and devastation caused by the Biden administration policies on the border, it’s shocking that’s he’s not been down there to see what he caused,” the border governor said.
“Go back two, two and a half years ago, we had some of the lowest border crossings in decades; go back over the last century, to see that low number of illegal border crossings. Then go to this fiscal year that ended on the 30th of September. We set an all-time record of 2.2 million apprehensions of people coming across the border illegally. He’s clearly by his own policies caused record-setting illegal immigration. But it goes beyond that. Look at the challenges that people in Del Rio, Eagle Pass and the small communities along the border have to deal with every single day.”
Abbott launched Operation Lone Star in the spring of 2021 to mobilize state resources to combat the surge in illegal immigration at the state’s souther border with Mexico, including deploying the state’s National Guard to help with security efforts.
“It is hypocritical on the one hand for the president and his staff to criticize me for having to deploy the National Guard to respond to his open border policies, now for them only to begin to deploy [other states’] National Guards is deeply hypocritical,” he said.
It’s also hypocritical, the Texas governor continued, for other Democratic leaders “to criticize me for helping out our local communities by busing out migrants to sanctuary cities like Washington, D.C., New York City, and Chicago, and then Biden and his administration moving migrants themselves in the middle of the night. What we are doing is really nothing different than what the Biden administration is doing.”
After the surge in illegal immigration, the Biden administration began flying foreign nationals to locations across the country without notifying elected officials in those states, Republican leaders say. After Abbott began busing migrants to the so-called sanctuary cities of Washington D.C., New York City and then Chicago, Democratic leaders in those locations called the initiative inhumane.
“It is rank hypocrisy that we are dealing with,” Abbott told The Center Square.
Since early last year, Abbott’s sent letters to Biden and others in his administration requesting information about who is being released into the country and where they are being transported to, among other questions, and has received no response. He’s formed interstate compacts with other Republican governors, signed memorandums of understanding with four Mexican governors, and was the first governor to begin building a border wall on Texas soil.
The Texas legislature has allocated over $4 billion to fund Texas’ border security efforts, including surging state resources to the southern border, including from Texas DPS and roughly 10,000 Texas National Guard troops.
Former Border Patrol agent Frank Lopez Jr., who’s running for Congress in the largest congressional district at the border, CD23, told The Center Square, “Any action by the Biden administration is suspect. The administration certainly has not secured the border; rather they’ve accelerated mass migration. The real purpose of sending troops to the border is certainly not to help Border Patrol agents get out in the field. Instead, the guardsmen and women will act as force multipliers so that more illegal aliens are detected and can be held until Border Patrol is ordered to process and release them into the United States in violation of immigration law.”
Lopez says he anticipates the move will only worsen morale for Border Patrol agents, which is “already at an all time low. This action will only exacerbate their situation and result in plummeting retention as more people seek to get out as soon as possible.”
Former acting Commissioner of Customs and Border Protection Mark Morgan told The Center Square, “The majority of intellectually honest people in America will see this for what it is – 30 days before election – a political stunt.
“These military resources are not being used to secure the border to apply consequences to those who are illegally entering the U.S. Instead they will be used to expedite the processing and releasing of more illegal aliens into the U.S.”
Morgan also points out that National Guard members don’t have legal authority to enforce federal immigration law. They will be tasked with assisting Border Patrol agents with non-enforcement operations, including air support, surveillance, transportation and detaining people who’ve entered the U.S. illegally until they can be picked up by Border Patrol agents.
“The administration’s plan is simply to facilitate more people coming through the border, making it less secure. And 2,500 troops is a drop in the bucket, completely for show,” he adds.
Even though Abbott’s Operation Lone Star has been effective, Morgan argues, the border is less secure than it was 19 months ago.
Morgan said “the administration can throw more resources and more money at the problem, it could even send 50,000 National Guard troops and it won’t change anything because the problem is a policy issue. Biden’s open border policies are driving more and more people to come here as we’ve already seen from over 150 countries, including 78 terrorists that we know of.”
The lies, hypocrisy and treachery of the treasonous, socialist Democrat Party and the puppet Biden cabal know no bounds.
This corrupt, demented puppet Joe Biden barely even knows where he is at or what day of the week it is. Puppet Joe Biden is just obediently doing what he is told to do by the treasonous, destructive, unethical, immoral self-serving Democrat Party’s elite.
AND what’s the bet the guard BIDEN Is sending, is under orders to HELP THE ILLEGAL INVADERS come in.. AND NOT to stop them.
Of course it’s hypocritical but we should never underestimate the ignorance of the American voter. There are many who thought the border crisis just started with illegal aliens being dropped off in NYC and they will see this as Biden ‘doing something’ about the problem.
‘Do something’ is the magic demand of the American people. They don’t know or give a damn whether ‘something’ is effective or not. Their president is doing something and that’s enough for a Biden supporter.
Are people Democrat Party supporters because they are Idiots?
Or are people Idiots because they are Democrat Party supporters?
The Democrat Party wins most of their followers because they are ill-informed and/or have low intellect. The Democrat Party’s propaganda or narrative works on an emotional level, not on the intellectual level. The Democrat Party cult is comprised and full of their “useful Idiot” disciples of Satan.
this is a fake democratic party. just like the nytimes once the great grey lady, and now a rag not useful even to wipe the inside of a used garbage can, the democrats center liberals and backbone of the working class, built the American middle class through unionization for which many workers laid down their lives and a safety net for marginal citizens. all of that has been wiped away and vanished into the cornfield. it is replaced by a nasty, ignorant virulently hateful cabal bordering on unhinged and mentally ill delusions of grandeur. a political party that supports lying, cheating, slander and even murder without consequences. unvetted illegals encouraged to cross our borders and roam our streets in every town and city. the democratic party has modeled itself after a totalitarian form of government targeting political opposition and the Constitution and The Bill of Rights. in short, everything we value.
Biden is sending to help illegals not close the border.
bingo john29.
I’d love to know just exactly where all of the ILLEGAL INVADERS are being housed all over the USA. We already had a housing crisis before they started pouring across our Southern border. This information would be helpful to hammer home to the uninformed as to the real costs which will be coming out of the pockets of EVERY TAXPAYER. Our filthy ILLEGITIMATE Government has to be housing them in large places like under utilized military bases. It’s way past time for our Republican Representatives to get a backbone and TAKE REAL ACTION TO STOP OUR COUNTRY FROM BEING DESTROYED!
In hotels, on the street, kicking homeless out of shelters..
Are those few military people only going to Texas, or is that number suppose to cover New Mexico and Arizona too? If so it’s nothing but one more attempt to fool the citizens and make them believe that the Administration is actually doing something about the invasion of illegals. If they believe that there is only about 2.2 million illegals that have come across our border, the democrats are more stupid than it’s always been thought.