As the situation at the southern border continues to disintegrate, more Texas officials are demanding a special session to pass bills that House leadership killed during the regular session.
As reported by The Dallas Express, the situation at the border has been described as “beyond a disaster” as thousands of unlawful migrants from across the world stream into the country on a daily basis.
After the 88th legislative session failed to pass several key border security proposals, Rep. Brian Harrison (R-Midlothian) and Rep. Matt Schaefer (R-Tyler) have called for a special session on the issue.
“Mexican cartels are killing tens of thousands of Americans with deadly Chinese-sourced fentanyl, and they are in complete control of the border,” the two representatives said.
“To combat the economic, public health, and national security crisis President Biden has created at our border, resulting in unprecedented loss of life and property, and the invasion of what is estimated to be greater than 10 million illegal crossings – including from human traffickers, cartels, gangs, and persons on the terror watch list — Texas must do everything in our power to lock down the border ourselves,” they continued.
“Texas must use every tool at our disposal to repel this invasion,” the statement added. “As authors of the most serious bills to secure the border this session including the Border Protection Unit Act and the Texas Title 42 Act, which were killed in the House, we are respectfully asking Governor Abbott to use every state and federal constitutional authority he has to stop the invasion and deport illegal migrants,” they urged.
The two lawmakers asked Gov. Greg Abbott to call a special session of the Texas Legislature “to provide additional legislative authorities and tools so that Texas can save our state and America from the Biden Border Crisis.”
For his part, Gov. Abbott recently pointed out that he had formally declared Texas under invasion in November 2022. Nevertheless, the federal government has countered some of the actions Abbott has taken in the name of the emergency.
“The U.S. Constitution won ratification by promising the States … that the federal government ‘shall protect each of them against Invasion,’” Abbott wrote to President Joe Biden last year. “Your Administration has made clear that it will not honor that guarantee.”
“The federal government’s failure has forced me to invoke Article I, §10, Clause 3 of the U.S. Constitution, thereby enabling the State of Texas to protect its own territory against invasion by the Mexican drug cartels,” the governor proclaimed.
“America is suffering the highest volume of illegal immigration in the history of our country,” he continued. “Texans are paying the price for your failure.”
However, the federal government has attempted to prevent Texas from taking measures to stop the unrestricted flow of unlawful migration.
As reported by The Dallas Express, the Department of Justice under President Biden recently sued Texas over a series of buoys deployed on the Rio Grande to deter migrants from crossing at that sector. The water barrier has been allowed to remain while litigation continues, and Abbott has promised to take the case all the way to the Supreme Court.
Additionally, federal border patrol agents have reportedly been cutting razor wire fencing placed by Texas law enforcement in order to allow more migrants to enter unlawfully.
However, the federal government has challenged Texas’ legal ability to declare an invasion and act to defend itself on those grounds.
“Even if Texas has been ‘actually invaded,’… the Constitution does not give Texas carte blanche to ‘take certain measures’ that it unilaterally chooses,” the government argued. “Given the novelty of Texas’s argument — and the extraordinary implications of its claim of sole discretion to declare an actual invasion and unilaterally, and indefinitely, engage in conduct unbound by federal statutes — Texas is decidedly unlikely to succeed in its defense.”
Additionally, the White House has defended its record on border security, with Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre recently saying, “The president has done more to secure the border, to deal with this issue of immigration than anybody else,” per Fox News.
“He really has!” she continued. “Look, the president has done what he can from here, from the federal government, from the White House to put forth and manage our border in a safe and humane way to respect the dignity of every human, as he says all the time, and making sure that our communities are safe.”