President Joe Biden visited the nation’s porous southern border on Sunday for the first time since he took office in 2021 to address the growing illegal immigration crisis. He spent time in El Paso, Texas, which recently had declared a state of emergency that gave authorities the resources and ability to shelter illegal aliens who have been crossing the Mexican border en masse.
In anticipation of visiting the border, Biden announced last Thursday an expansion to the current immigration parole system, which will allow an additional 30,000 illegal foreign nationals a month from Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba, and Nicaragua to remain in the United States. This new policy is being challenged in court by Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody. That case is being heard this week.
While at the border, Biden visited Doniphan Park in El Paso for a press briefing after viewing first hand a section of the border. He was caught off guard when asked by a reporter about a letter that Governor Greg Abbott had hand delivered to him. Biden safely responded, “I didn’t get a chance to read it yet. I haven’t read it yet. I’m —.”
Abbott has spent the last two years attempting to protect Texans from the massive influx of illegal immigrants crossing the border in what can only be described as an invasion. He launched Operation Lone Star in March of 2021 in an effort to stem the tide of illegal drugs and criminals flooding into Texas. This includes assistance from Texas Highway Patrol Troopers, Special Agents, Texas Rangers, Rotary and Fixed Winged Aircraft and Tactical Boat Teams, along with the Texas National Guard and local law enforcement, to secure the border.
Since its launch, Operation Lone Star has led to more than 340,000 illegal immigrant apprehensions and more than 23,000 criminal arrests, with more than 21,000 felony charges reported. In the fight against fentanyl, DPS has seized over 355 million lethal doses of fentanyl during this border mission.
Abbott’s letter to Biden was blunt in pure Texan style, starting with:
Your visit to our southern border with Mexico today is $20 billion too little and two years too late. Moreover, your visit avoids the sites where mass illegal immigration occurs and sidesteps the thousands of angry Texas property owners whose lives have been destroyed by your border policies. Even the city you visit has been sanitized of the migrant camps which had overrun downtown El Paso because your Administration wants to shield you from the chaos that Texans experience on a daily basis. This chaos is the direct result of your failure to enforce the immigration laws that Congress enacted.
After officially welcoming the president to the border, albeit halfway through his presidency, Abbott gave Biden five specific actions his administration can immediately take to secure the border and restore order to an out-of-control immigration crisis. That was of course after Biden finished “the photo-ops in a carefully stage-managed version of El Paso.”
Governor Abbott’s requested actions of President Biden are as follows:
• You must comply with the many statutes mandating that various categories of aliens “shall” be detained, and end the practice of unlawfully paroling aliens en masse.
• You must stop sandbagging the implementation of the Remain-in-Mexico policy and Title 42 expulsions, and fully enforce those measures as the federal courts have ordered you to do.
• You must aggressively prosecute illegal entry between ports of entry, and allow ICE to remove illegal immigrants in accordance with existing federal laws.
• You must immediately resume construction of the border wall in the State of Texas, using the billions of dollars Congress has appropriated for that purpose.
• You must designate the Mexican drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations.
Biden’s brief border visit was a stepping stone on his trip to Mexico City to meet with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador at the 2023 North American Leaders’ Summit. The topic of “transnational criminal organizations trafficking and smuggling people and illicit drugs like fentanyl” is on the agenda based on the White House fact sheet, but will most likely get buried as the top listed challenge to be addressed is “climate change.”
It is quite apparent that Biden does not want to solve the illegal immigration crisis, and outside of his photo ops and political rhetoric at the border, he’s perfectly fine with willfully ignoring his sworn Constitutional obligation to defend the States against invasion through faithful execution of federal laws. The Biden administration’s desire to “stop” the border crisis with toothless policies and a new immigration parole system is just another shining distraction to his real goal of destroying our nation’s sovereignty.
