Texas not backing down from Biden’s immigration invasion

Joe Biden’s lawless, cynical, and dangerous immigration policy – to invite an invasion of our southern border – has created cascading crises for the country. 

Now, they are set to culminate in a constitutional crisis because one state is deigning to defend its citizens where the Biden administration is endangering them.

First, to the staggering numbers about the invasion:

Due to more than five-dozen policies the White House has enacted to erase our border and undermine our sovereignty: 

• Authorities have had more than 6 million encounters with illegal aliens since Joe Biden was inaugurated, and more than 3.3 million such aliens have been released into the U.S. 
• 99.7% have not been removed through immigration proceedings – one illegal alien removed for every 26 permitted to stay in the U.S.
• Well over 600,000 illegal aliens on ICE’s non-detained docket have criminal convictions or pending criminal chargesThere have been over 1.7 million so-called “gotaways” – people seen or detected but not interacted with by authorities – at the Southern border
• 294 illegal aliens on terror watchlist apprehended at Southwest border between points of entry since beginning of FY 2021. How many not apprehended? 
• During the last fiscal year, authorities seized fentanyl in quantities large enough to kill 6 billion people, supposedly only a small fraction of the fentanyl transported across the southwest border 

One state been desperately trying to do something to halt the invasion, defend its sovereignty, and with it the country, and that’s Texas.

In March 2021 it launched Operation Lone Star to “surge the resources and law enforcement personnel needed to confront” the “crisis” of President Biden’s refusal to “secure the border and invite illegal immigration.” 

It has undertaken a slew of measures to defend its border, which it has argued in court has led to over 475,000 illegal alien apprehensions, tens of thousands of criminal arrests, and the seizing of 428 million lethal doses of fentanyl.

Among its actions are placing physical barriers to prevent or minimally deter would-be border crossers, including installing concertina wire – coiled barbed wire.

One area where it’s done so is Eagle Pass, where 14,000 people entered in under two weeks recently – nearly half the city’s population.

Yet Texas says federal agents have been destroying the wire across a 29-mile stretch of riverbank there to

–Quote—

encourage and assist thousands of aliens to illegally cross the Rio Grande and enter Texas…not only cut[ing] Texas’s concertina wire, but also attach[ing] ropes or cables from the back of pickup trucks to ease aliens’ ability to illegally climb up the riverbank into Texas…they regularly cut new openings in the wire fence, sometimes immediately after Texas officers have placed new wire to plug gaps in fencing barriers

So Texas sued the feds for thwarting their border security efforts.And it sought an injunction to stop the feds from continuing to destroy fencing in the interim.

That controversy wound up at the Supreme Court, which last week vacated the injunction – striking down the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals’ ruling in Texas’ favor – by a 5-4 vote in which Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Barrett joined the court’s liberals.

Texas is vowing not to back down. It is continuing to deploy the razor wire – which to be clear the Court did not rule was illegal. 

It simply said the feds could keep cutting it down, for now. This effort is consistent with Governor Greg Abbott’s statement following the ruling.

“The federal government has broken the compact between the United States and the States,” Governor Abbott writes.

He proceeds to lay out the various ways the administration has flouted the laws to overrun our borders.

Subsquently, he invokes the Constitution to defend Texas’ policy – noting the Article 4 Section 4 responsibility of the federal government to “protect each [State] against invasion” and appealing to Article 1 Section 10 Clause 3 which codifies the ability for states to take action to defend themselves if “invaded,” as the feds have allowed – or as Justice Scalia put it, acknowledging “the States’ sovereign interest in protecting its borders.”

Still to come is what the courts, and almost certainly the Supreme Court will say about Texas standing in the breach when the feds willfully subvert and sabotage the law.

The feds argue they are supreme when it comes to immigration policy – even destroying our borders. But it doesn’t seem to jibe with the Constitution that states have to sit back and take it when they’re invaded. Now, what Governor Abbott alludes to in his letter he has not yet argued in Court.

Wade Miller, Executive Director of Citizens for Renewing America, cautions: Picking a big standoff with the feds, to merely establish that we can put up razor wire in a few localities, which will only push illegal aliens to cross in other parts of Texas, or to cut through the wire, only to still eventually be released into the interior of the United States won’t get the job done

He adds:

it’s…important that Abbott creates this fight as a means to an end that results in the invasion being repelled, and that it is done so in a manner legally consistent with the power he’s been granted by the Constitution and that those actions are properly defended by the AG of Texas

I wholeheartedly concur.