Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said on Wednesday that the State of Texas is taking immediate action to stem the flow of illegal immigrants crossing the US-Mexico border, including building a wall, deploying National Guard troops and using shipping containers to create a temporary barrier to block border-jumpers.
“We now have 6,500 National Guard and DPS troopers on the border to help secure the border,” Abbott told Fox News host Tucker Carlson. “And as we’re talking right now, they are identifying locations on the border, where they are laying down razor wire to secure all the possible crossings that these caravans may be coming to.”
“And then in addition to that, beginning today, we begin dropping these large containers that you see on 18 wheelers, that you also see on these ships that are going across the ocean, we’re dropping them down on locations that could be crossings that would be used by these caravans to serve as a blockade to prevent them from becoming across the border,” Abbott continued. “And then on top of that, if they do come across the border, the National Guard of the Texas Department of Public Safety, they are authorized to arrest, you know, these people who make it through our blockade efforts and put them in jail for violating a crime of criminal trespass in the state of Texas.”
Abbott said Texas is also “stepping up” and “building our own border wall.” Texas is already in the process of taking bids on the wall project, and Abbott said he expects “part of the Texas wall to be completed before the end of this calendar year.”
The governor said President Joe Biden’s administration has been “pushing back every step of the way.”
“Joe Biden believes in open border policies and his administration does. They’re truly trying to redesign the United States of America in a complete lawless way. They talked about this on the campaign trail when all the Democrats were on the debate stage talking about, quite literally, the socialistic policies they would employ in the United States, which mimic Ocasio-Cortez and her acolytes, and they are acting out on all of those policies and promises they made during the campaign.”
“That leaves it to the states now to step up and do everything we can to hold onto the United States of America until Republicans can regain control of Congress and the presidency,” Abbott added.
In FY21, 1,734,686 illegal immigrants were arrested at the southern border, a dramatic increase from the 458,088 encounters in FY20 and still almost twice as many as 2019, according to United States Customs and Border Protection statistics.
