Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) announced over the week that he is launching an operation to combat human and drug trafficking along the state’s border with Mexico which comes as the region is dealing with an illegal immigration crisis that has erupted on President Joe Biden’s watch.
“The crisis at our southern border continues to escalate because of Biden Administration policies that refuse to secure the border and invite illegal immigration,” Abbott said. “Texas supports legal immigration but will not be an accomplice to the open border policies that cause, rather than prevent, a humanitarian crisis in our state and endanger the lives of Texans. We will surge the resources and law enforcement personnel needed to confront this crisis.”
The Austin American-Statesman says that the operation will be a joint task force initiative headed by the Texas Department of Public Safety and the Texas National Guard. The operation will “deploy air, ground, marine, and tactical border security units to high-threat areas to deny Mexican cartels and other smugglers the ability to move drugs and people into Texas,” the report said.
The news comes as reports have surfaced from major national news publications highlighting the Biden administration’s border crisis. The New York Times reported that thousands of unaccompanied migrant children detained along the southern border are being held in facilities “akin to jails.” USA Today reported that Biden was separating children from their relatives “for weeks” in some cases, in accordance with U.S. law. Democrats and the media both repeatedly attacked former President Donald Trump over both issues when he was president.
Biden’s border crisis is so bad that the administration has reportedly decided to allow the migrant detention facilities to operate at 100% capacity to deal with the surge. “The fact that the country’s premier health advisory agency [CDC] is permitting a change in COVID-19 protocols indicates the scale of the immigration crisis,” Axios reported. “Shelters have been getting an average of 321 children per day — up from 47 per day the first week of January — and expect to need 20,000 beds to accommodate an anticipated record number of child migrants.”
The Biden administration has also reportedly considered changing the name of the detention facilities to “reception centers” in an attempt to make the entire situation sound less harsh. Last week, two U.S. lawmakers, both Democrats, warned that Biden’s policies would be disastrous for the region.
“Well, my concern at this in the recent weeks in my district, migrants who made it across the border, who even pass the line of MPPs [Migrant Protection Protocols], who were 5,000 folks that have been waiting for two years across the border, made it across the Rio Grande Valley were processed and released,” Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (D-TX) told CNN. “If that is the message that we send to Central America and around the world, I can assure you, it won’t be long before we have tens of thousands of people showing up to our border.”
“And it’ll be catastrophic for our party, for our country, for my region, for my district, in the middle of a pandemic, in an area where we’ve lost over 3,000 people in my small congressional district,” he continued. “So, I think we need to have a better plan in place. I think asylum seekers should be able to ask for asylum and be processed in their home country or a neighboring country. And we shouldn’t have a policy in place that impulses people to make this 2,000 mile trek where cartels and human traffickers are enriching themselves.”