Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley claimed that states can secede from the Union should voters will it in a recent interview on The Breakfast Club.
Haley made the comments while discussing the ongoing battle between Texas and the Biden administration over the federal government’s inability to manage the record-high levels of unlawful migration coming in across the southern border.
“If that whole state says, ‘We don’t want to be part of America anymore,’ I mean, that’s their decision to make,” Haley said, according to ABC News. “Let’s talk about what’s reality. Texas isn’t going to secede.”
Texas did secede in the 19th century, however, with delegates of the State of Texas voting to leave the Union and join the Confederate States of America. They did so 163 years ago today, on February 2, 1861. While the issue of slavery was an important part of the state’s decision to secede, so was violence and raiding along its border with Mexico.
“By the disloyalty of the Northern States and their citizens and the imbecility of the Federal Government, infamous combinations of incendiaries and outlaws have been permitted in those States … to usurp the possession of the same as exclusively the property of the Northern States,” the delegates wrote at the time.
“The Federal Government … has for years almost entirely failed to protect the lives and property of the people of Texas against the Indian savages on our border, and more recently against the murderous forays of banditti from the neighboring territory of Mexico,” the state’s declaration of secession reads.
The current standoff between the Biden administration and Texas over the overwhelming number of unlawful migrants crossing into the United States has led to some state politicians reviving the notion of secession and a return to the Republic of Texas, as previously reported by The Dallas Express.