Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is touting a sharp drop in border crossings in 2024, arguing that it is due to the efforts of his state rather than the policies of the Biden administration, which he says have hurt, not helped, the effort to secure the border as the administration has sought to “tear down” what Texas has done.
“Texas has the largest border of any state in the United States of America. And, in the early years of the Biden administration, it was Texas that was being overrun by the illegal immigration policies that were promoted and implemented by [President] Biden and by [Vice President Kamala] Harris,” he said in an interview with Fox News Digital.
Abbott pursued an aggressive strategy under Operation Lone Star, in which he surged troops and resources to the border, building its own border wall after the Biden administration stopped construction, setting up buoys in the Rio Grande and installing razor wire fence. It has led to a number of legal battles in court between the state and the Biden administration. The White House accused Abbott of putting migrants and Border Patrol at risk and impeding federal law enforcement.
After three years of a historic crisis at the southern border, with records of encounters being repeatedly smashed since Biden entered the White House, numbers dropped dramatically over the summer.
The White House tied the sharp drop in encounters to an executive order Biden signed in June which restricted asylum entries into the U.S. — with encounters in July the lowest since September 2020.
The administration has argued that it needs more funding and reforms from Congress, but that Republicans have voted against them for political purposes. Specifically, officials have cited a bipartisan bill that would have increased funding while putting some limits on entries. It has failed to make it out of the Senate.
“For months, the Biden-Harris Administration worked with a bipartisan group of Senators to craft a historic bipartisan border security agreement that would have added thousands of frontline personnel to the border — but Congressional Republicans voted against that agreement twice — proving that they are more interested in cynically playing politics than securing the border,” the White House said last month. “The Biden-Harris Administration has taken effective action, and Republicans continue to do nothing.”
HOW EAGLE PASS BECAME THE CENTERPIECE OF ABBOTT’S EFFORTS TO SECURE THE BORDER
Texas National Guard troops watch over more than 1,000 immigrants who had crossed the Rio Grande overnight from Mexico in Eagle Pass, Texas, on Dec. 18, 2023. (John Moore/Getty Images)
But Abbott has said that the drop in Texas has had nothing to do with those policies.
“In Texas, illegal immigration has gone down about 85%, while it is higher than that in Arizona, New Mexico and California,” he said. “So it shows that what Texas is doing is working despite the fact that Biden and Harris have challenged Texas every step of the way to try to tear down what we built.”
Abbott’s comments come amid an ongoing political battle over who is responsible for the border crisis and which presidential candidate is better positioned to fix it.
Harris has recently claimed that she is the better candidate to solve the issues at the border, zeroing in on the bipartisan Senate bill and blaming former President Trump for its failure.
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“As president, I will bring back the bipartisan border security bill that he killed, and I will sign it into law. I know… we can live up to our proud heritage as a nation of immigrants and reform our broken immigration system. We can create an earned pathway to citizenship and secure our border,” she said at the Democratic National Convention.
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Abbott said that Harris believes in “open border policies” and said he would be supporting Trump in the November election.
“Americans need to learn the reality, both of how the policy changed under Biden-Harris and what Kamala Harris would do to pretty much put America on a pathway of destruction,” he said.