The nation is on the verge of a Constitutional crisis as Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is building barriers to keep illegal immigrants from crossing into his state, while President Joe Biden is ordering them taken down. As Abbott defies the White House and keeps putting the barriers up, the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in on the conflict, ruling that the federal government has the authority to take them down.
The Constitutional consequences of the issue are extreme. Texas is being overrun by migrants under a Biden administration policy that accepts their claim of needing political asylum and gives them all the resources they need—cash, cellphones, transportation, medical care—to settle into communities across the country. Abbott is trying to stop them by erecting razor wire on Shelby State Park in Eagle Pass, a popular point for illegal crossers along the Rio Grande River. Federal border control agents have been ordered to cut the wire, setting up the critical question of which governmental entity has the authority to protect the public.
“This office will continue to defend Texas’s efforts to protect its southern border against every effort by the Biden Administration to undermine the State’s constitutional right of self-defense,” wrote Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in a letter to the White House. “There is not even a pretense that you are trying to prevent the illegal entry of aliens. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security should stop wasting scarce time and resources suing Texas and start enforcing the immigration laws Congress already has on the books.”
Republican governors from 25 states have sided with Abbott, offering their support in his battle with Biden. “President Biden and his Administration have left Americans and our country completely vulnerable to unprecedented illegal immigration pouring across the Southern border,” they stated in a joint letter under the heading of the Republican Governors Association. “Instead of upholding the rule of law and securing the border, the Biden Administration has attacked and sued Texas for stepping up to protect American citizens from historic levels of illegal immigrants, deadly drugs like fentanyl, and terrorists entering our country.”
Governor Henry McMaster entered the fray, announcing: “At the request of Governor Greg Abbott, I have directed the deployment of South Carolina National Guard troops to Texas to help hold the line on the Southern border. The safety and security of South Carolinians require that we stop the drug cartels, criminals, and terrorists from entering our country to peddle their poison.”
Biden’s open border policy has enticed record numbers of unvetted—and unvaccinated—people from almost every nation to come to America. December broke a record as an estimated 371,000 non-U.S. citizens were encountered at the southern border and then processed into the country. Mexican cartels and non-government organizations are making millions facilitating what is being called an “invasion,” with every state now considered a “border state” as the migrants are dispersed nationwide. Under Biden’s policy, the new arrivals are given court dates for their asylum claims, most of which are years in the future, leaving local governments to support them at the expense of their legal citizens.
As border agents are forced into a “concierge” role to process the aliens into the United States, drug cartels use the distraction to ferry in record amounts of Fentanyl and other deadly drugs. The cheap and easy availability of these lethal substances has created a drug overdose epidemic that has destroyed families across the nation. Acting without support from the Biden Administration, Texas authorities in 2022 alone intercepted enough Fentanyl to kill every American. Officials are also worried that the 5,000 illegals coming into the country on average per day include terrorists and foreign operators who have motives other than to assimilate.
Choosing to go to areas deemed as sanctuaries by the Democrats who run them, the migrants are inundating U.S. cities in unprecedented numbers. In New York, Mayor Eric Adams calculated the cost to care for the nearly 140,000 people who have accepted his sanctuary invite at $12 billion. Gov. Kathy Hochul called for spending $2.4 billion for migrant services in her latest budget, up $1 billion from the previous year, with the governor forced to pull $500 million from the state’s reserve fund to pick up the tab for housing, education, health, and other services she wants to give them. Failing to anticipate the porosity of the U.S. border and the extent of the mass migration permitted by Biden, Adams said he now believes the migrant crisis “will destroy New York City.”
The border crisis has led Republicans in the House of Representatives to file articles of impeachment against the director of Homeland Security. “Alejandro N. Mayorkas willfully and systemically refused to comply with the immigration laws, failed to control the border to the detriment of national security, compromised public safety, and violated the rule of law and separation of powers in the Constitution, to the manifest injury of the people of the United States," the impeachment resolution states. The move, only the second against a cabinet secretary in U.S. history, comes as Mayorkas, Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and other Biden officials insist that the U.S. borders are secure and any flaws in the immigration system are the fault of the Republicans and former President Donald Trump.
“They don’t want to fix the problem; they want to campaign on it,” the Homeland Security Department said in a statement. “That’s why they have undermined efforts to achieve bipartisan solutions and ignored the facts, legal scholars and experts, and even the Constitution itself in their quest to baselessly impeach Secretary Mayorkas.”
Working with the Senate, Mayorkas is looking to forward legislation that will codify Biden’s open border policy and give amnesty to those already in the country, a bill deemed “dead on arrival” by House Speaker Mike Johnson. The fact that some GOP senators are in on the amnesty package rankles Republican voters who see the migrant problem as their top concern. With the presidential election looming in November, the issue has huge political implications. The Biden administration is seen as loath to have federal law enforcement clash with Texas authorities over razor wire. Stumping to secure the Republican line in his bid to retake the Oval Office, Trump blames his rival for causing the crisis and promises to deport the immigrants Biden let in.