Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott said on Sunday that he plans to sign a new state law that will authorize every police officer in the Lone Star State to arrest immigrants who illegally entered Texas from another country.
“Texas is having to step up and do even more to make sure that we deny illegal entry into the state of Texas and as a result … in two weeks I’ll be singing [the] new law,” Abbott said during an interview with Fox News.
Last month, Texas Republicans sent the governor SB4 — a bill that would authorize local police to handle immigration enforcement by making it a state misdemeanor to cross the Texas-Mexico border illegally.
If passed, the legislation that state officials have dubbed “the strongest border security bill” would also allow a judge to order immigrants to return to Mexico.
The latest effort from Abbott amid his battle with the Biden Administration’s open border policies comes as millions of illegal crossings have taken place under President Joe Biden.
“The problem is extraordinarily bad,” Abbott said. “The numbers are high, and that is because Joe Biden continues to lay out the welcome mat welcoming illegal immigrants into the United States of America.”
House Republicans cited numbers from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and Yale University that showed between 16.8 million and 29 million illegal migrants currently living in the U.S. The data indicates that about 3.8 million migrants have entered the country under President Biden’s watch, overwhelming U.S. Border Patrol authorities — who continue to sound the alarm over the historic number of illegal immigrants entering the country.
Border sources told Fox News that authorities have encountered nearly 475,000 migrants with just over an additional 60,000 getaways in the fiscal year— some of whom have been reportedly said to be on the FBI terror watch list.
“That’s why Texas is having to step up and apprehend as many of these people as possible to make sure that they’re not posing a threat to our country, but this is a very serious existential threat to our country caused by Joe Biden,” Abbott said. “And that’s exactly why Texas is taking extraordinary steps to try to crack down on it.”
But under Abbott’s leadership, Texas reversed course last year by sending tens of thousands of migrants to so-called sanctuary cities run by Democrat officials — who were quick to voice criticism over the governor’s orders.
Last week, Abbott bussed roughly 70,000 immigrants to Democrat-run cities around the nation, including more than 12,500 migrants to Washington D.C., 25,000 to New York City, 20,000 to Chicago, 3,200 to Philadelphia, 7,400 to Denver, and over 1,000 to Los Angeles.
Texas officials also deployed deterrence buoys in the Rio Grande River earlier this year to reduce the number of illegal immigrants entering the U.S.
Almost immediately after installing the floating barriers, Abbott’s administration found itself in legal battles with the Department of Justice, which argued the state unlawfully placed the buoys and that building any structure in US water would require permission from the United States Army Corps of Engineers.
The 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals favored the Biden administration in its ongoing border battle with Texas by ordering the removal of the barriers, according to CNN.
Abbott told Fox News on Sunday that the state would take the issue up to the Supreme Court if it fails in its next challenge in the lower court.