Still, the Texas program has not succeeded in what is perhaps Mr. Abbott’s biggest goal, his top advisers acknowledged: forcing the federal government to adopt more stringent border controls, favored by Republicans.
About 1.1 million migrants were
encountered by federal border agents along the Texas border in the 11 months before the end of August. Around 40 percent of those encountered across the southern U.S. border have been released into the country.
Mr. Abbott is now pursuing an even more audacious effort: to change Texas law to make crossing the border from Mexico without authorization a state crime, allowing the police in Texas to arrest people coming across the Rio Grande, including asylum seekers.
The State Senate
passed a bill to do just that this month during a special legislative session, though it has yet to be approved by the Texas House. Immigration lawyers said the legislation amounted to a violation of the federal government’s pre-emptive role in setting immigration policy.
Some critics see the move as a deliberate attempt to create a court case that could allow the more conservative Supreme Court to broaden state power over immigration. Jennefer Canales-Pelaez, a lawyer and Texas policy strategist at the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, called the bill “an obvious attempt to challenge Arizona v. United States,” referring to a 2012 Supreme Court decision upholding the federal government’s role in immigration.
Top advisers to Mr. Abbott said that overturning that precedent was not the intent, but added that the administration would be prepared to defend such a law in court as part of its challenge to federal immigration policy.
“We feel like we’re the only ones pushing back,” said Gardner Pate, the governor’s chief of staff. “We’re pulling every lever we can, and trying to think of new ones every day.”
The busing program has been one part of Mr. Abbott’s multibillion-dollar border security effort, known as Operation Lone Star, that includes
using National Guard troops and state police to deter migrants from crossing the Rio Grande, laying down
concertina wire along the shoreline and arresting some of those who cross onto private land
on charges of criminal trespassing.
www.nbcchicago.com
chicago law???wtf
As someone who actually lives here, stop watching them hot take ass videos. Man has been in office all of 170 days. He gotta hear everybodies mouth every day so he will either get it straight or fall off, but people have had way worse, way longer tenured politicians do worse in normal ass circumstances and survive.
