When former President Donald Trump was keeping watch on the Mexico border, there was no immigration crisis, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said.
That changed Jan. 20 when Joe Biden became president, Abbott said during a Sept. 30 session of The Advance with Texas Public Policy Foundation CEO Kevin Roberts.
“Where we were a year ago, is that under President Trump, the border was more secure than it had ever been,” he said. “And there were some very simple reasons why. One is because the president negotiated the 'Remain in Mexico' policy. Two, he implemented the Title 42 policy. The Title 42 policy is a health-based policy for those who were coming across the border. The president said you can't come across the border because you could have COVID-19 and because of health care reasons. We don't want people to come into the country and spreading COVID. Three, he ended catch and release and he began building a border wall. You add all those things together and they proved to be very effective.”
Trump sent a clear message that he was securing the sovereignty of the United States of America and would not allow open borders, Abbott said.
“When Biden took over as president, he eliminated all of those programs that proved so incredibly successful,” the governor said. “And he sent the exact opposite message across the entire world, and that is no longer is the Biden administration securing our border, but in addition to that, he was implementing open-border policies, attracting people from across the entire world to come into the United States. And it was that type of messaging that led to the oncoming of the incredible number of Haitians, which is just the most recent example.”
Abbott said Texas is putting its money where its mouth is on this issue.
“One thing that was done that is needed because these things don't come free, we have to have funding,” he said. “And through both the regular [legislative] session and the special session, we have now added $3 billion from Texas taxpayers to secure our border.
"The money is going to add National Guard on our border," he said. "Those National Guard have been authorized by me as governor to enforce the Texas laws, along with the Texas Department of Public Safety, which is the second thing that we're funding of people going down there. When you add together the Texas Department of Public Safety Officers, as well as the National Guard, we have thousands of people on the border already.”
Abbott said but when National Guardsmen and DPS troopers erected a barrier with their vehicles and personnel, undocumented immigrants were no longer crossing the border.
He said Texas proved it can and will respond to challenges at the border, which is important, as other caravans of people reportedly are approaching.
“We know that we have intelligence about that,” Abbott said. “And we are working with National Guard generals and with director [Steven] McCraw of the Texas Department of Public Safety to begin the preparations right now for all the different strategies that we will use to try to repel these oncoming caravans, the exact same way that we were able to repel an end the Haitians who were coming across the border.
“In addition to those strategies, there's another strategy that we implemented, and that is to begin to arrest and jail people who are coming across the border illegally,” he said. “We needed to create an entirely new criminal justice system in South Texas with courts, with judges, with jails to house the people that we were arresting. The jails were full. We had to work with the Texas Department of Criminal Justice to create thousands of jail beds. And we worked with the Office of Court Administration to the judges who were needed to adjudicate these proceedings."
With the criminal trespassing law in place, people who enter the country and are caught on either public or private property face harsher penalties. They could end up behind bars for six months to a year.
Abbott said Texas is taking building a wall seriously as well.
“The process that Texas will pursue should be faster than what the Trump administration was able to pursue for several reasons,” he said. “First, the Trump administration building the wall, they had to acquire property typically through lawsuit, through eminent domain purposes, because there are so many landowners on the border who are so frustrated and so angry about the open-border policies of the Barack Obama administration. We have so many landowners who are offering their property for Texas to build a wall along. And then on top of that, we have state property that we're building a wall on.”
Abbott said Texas will not follow the Trump policy of building levees with fences atop them. That means the cost will be half what the federal government was spending.
Texas also is pursuing this issue in the courts. A federal judge who was appointed by Trump ordered Biden to reinstate the "Remain in Mexico" policy.
“We got that judgment before you saw the catastrophe of all the Haitians coming across the border, and because it's clear that the Biden administration did not impose the remaining Mexico policy with regard to the Haitians, it's clear they were in violation of the federal order,” Abbott said. “Last Friday we went back to court seeking to hold the administration responsible for not following a federal judge's decision. After the federal judge's decision, the administration appealed that all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court and the Supreme Court allowed that lower court decision to remain in place.”
Texas also is asking a judge to force the Biden administration to enforce the Title 42 policy, which is based on a 1944 federal law.
“We'll see if we get the same result in that case as we did in the Remain in Mexico case,” he said. “But if we can get those two procedures back into place, that will do more than anything else to stop the flow of people coming across the border illegally. But in the meantime, the main thing I want you to know, the main takeaway I want you to have, and that is, that we have thousands of personnel on the border as we speak right now to ensure that we are going to be guarding the safety and security of the people in the state of Texas as much as possible and making arrests as much as possible."
Abbott said he has issued an executive order that allows him to control ingress and egress of an area for public safety reasons. Because of COVID-19, he has limited the travel of undocumented people within the state.
That order is being challenged in court, and no decision has been made.
He said the state will be “relentless in making sure that we use every tool and strategy to secure the border in Texas.”
That effort is appreciated by Hispanics who live along the border, Abbott said, and he believes the majority of them will support Republican policies and candidates.
On other issues, the governor said he’s confident the Texas Legislature will do a good job on legislative redistricting.
He said the legislature lived up to its campaign promises, passing a balanced budget with no tax increases and billions of dollars in savings. A law imposing spending limits based on population increases and the rate of inflation also was passed.
In addition, laws preventing the closure of churches, to prohibit censorship of conservative viewpoints on social media and banning defunding law enforcement.
The legislature also fixed a broken bail process that placed Texans in danger, Abbott said.
Perhaps most important, he said, a significant election integrity law was passed and signed into law. Ballot harvesting will be stopped, the governor said.