As President Biden visited the U.S.-Mexico border on Sunday to witness the illegal immigration crisis that has originated under his administration, Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) hand-delivered a letter to the president in which he called on Biden to do his job and secure the border.
“Your visit to our southern border with Mexico today is $20 billion too little and two years too late,” Abbott said to Biden in the letter. “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.”
“Under President Trump, the federal government achieved historically low levels of illegal immigration,” Abbott continued. “Under your watch, by contrast, America is suffering the worst illegal immigration in the history of our country. Your open-border policies have emboldened the cartels, who grow wealthy by trafficking deadly fentanyl and even human beings. Texans are paying an especially high price for your failure, sometimes with their very lives, as local leaders from your own party will tell you if given the chance.”
“All of this is happening because you have violated your constitutional obligation to defend the States against invasion through faithful execution of federal laws. Halfway through your presidency, though, I can finally welcome you to the border. When you finish the photo-ops in a carefully stage-managed version of El Paso, you have a job to do,” Abbott said, then listed actions Biden should take to secure the border.
“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 mass,” Abbott said. “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,” Abbott continued. “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.”
FInally, Abbott told Biden that he “must designate the Mexican drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations.”
“On behalf of all Americans, I implore you: Secure our border by enforcing Congress’s immigration laws,” Abbott concluded.
