As the federal government and Texas face a standoff in court, border security experts say the situation has reached historic levels of dysfunction.
The Department of Justice recently sued Texas over the system of buoys installed on the Rio Grande to deter unlawful entry into the United States, as reported by The Dallas Express.
Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta explained in a press release, “We allege that Texas has flouted federal law by installing a barrier in the Rio Grande without obtaining the required federal authorization.”
Gov. Abbott has condemned the lawsuit, saying, “Instead of taking action to stop illegal border crossings, Biden is suing Texas for doing HIS job.”
“Texas will defend our sovereign authority to secure the border against the Biden Administration’s lawsuit,” he added.
While the Lone Star State and Washington, D.C., struggle over border security measures, longtime observers have suggested that the crisis has devolved into a full-scale meltdown.
Andrew Arthur, resident fellow in law and policy for the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), explained to The Dallas Express, “The Biden administration refuses to call it a disaster, and I’ve seen border disasters before, and this is beyond a disaster.”
Arthur has been involved in immigration law and studies since the 1990s when he clerked for Judge Joseph McGuire in the Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review. Afterward, he worked in the Immigration and Naturalization Service as general counsel for the House Judiciary Committee overseeing immigration issues and served eight years as an immigration judge.
“It’s simply chaos,” he added, claiming that Abbott’s Operation Lone Star alone is mitigating the policies of the current administration. “Those officers along the Rio Grande are the only thing that keeps the border from going into complete meltdown.”
“In many ways, Gov. Abbott and the state of Texas are at cross purposes with President Biden and his policy advisors who … have a tendency to allow all of those people to cross over illegally,” Arthur suggested. “The Biden administration does nothing to discourage them.”
“The reason that so many people are coming now — and these are historic numbers we’ve never seen before — is because of the Biden administration’s non-detention policies,” he explained. “It’s pretty basic logic.”
Arthur said that CIS “has been told that the Mexican authorities on the other side coordinate with Customs and Border Protection on the north side of the river to send groups of people over to then be processed and released in the United States.”
“There’s no sanction for that whatsoever in U.S. law, none whatsoever,” the former immigration judge explained.
The Biden administration, however, has claimed that its border policies have been effective in securing the country and reducing the number of unlawful crossings.
In a statement released in June, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) claimed, “As a result of planning and execution — which combined stiffer consequences for unlawful entry with a historic expansion of lawful pathways and processes — unlawful entries between ports of entry along the Southwest Border have decreased by more than 70 percent.”
“The Administration’s plan is working as intended,” the release continued.
DHS also suggested, “It is abundantly clear that executive action cannot solve the entrenched challenge of migration in our region, and that neither party can address its impact on our border by itself.”
“Until and unless Congress comes together in a bipartisan way to address our broken immigration and asylum system, we will continue to see surges in migration at our border,” the department concluded.
Meanwhile, Abbott’s attempt to address the border crisis through Operation Lone Star has come under fire of late. Sen. Roland Gutierrez (D-San Antonio) recently sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland demanding an investigation into the border security measures taken by Texas.
Gutierrez suggested in the letter that an investigation into these claims by the Department of Justice was long overdue.
“Since he launched Operation Lone Star more than two years ago, Gov. Abbott has taken drastic measures to curb illegal immigration. … What began as a farce has now turned into violent, horrifying injuries and death,” Gutierrez wrote, according to The Texan.