A toddler, passed out from heat exhaustion and caught on a coil of barbed wire, pushed back without assistance by armed men. Desperate people denied water on orders from above, and left to die as a deterrent to others. These aren’t scenes from some UN observer report on a warzone, but details from a Texas state trooper’s email to a supervisor, obtained by the Houston Chronicle, calling the force’s border deployment “inhumane.”
As always, Gov. Greg Abbott is couching his efforts in the language of anti-smuggling (despite the fact that the vast majority of smuggling takes place at official ports of entry) and insisting that he’s being forced to take on a role that the federal government is neglecting. In reality he’s trying to violently wrest away control over a key federal function, with little resistance.
Abbott is right that President Joe Biden and the feds are abdicating a crucial role, just not in the way that he means. How can Biden allow a governor to appoint himself a border enforcer and use state tools to preempt the federal role of immigration regulation in a way that has long passed the point of being merely performative or annoying but has become an active violation of human rights?
Texas’ approach is killing desperate people right under Biden’s nose. This is not an issue that the federal government can just leave to the state, and things have only gotten this bad because Biden has refused to step in as Abbott has spent over a year with his increasingly damaging red meat border posturing.
While Gov. Ron DeSantis’ battles with Disney and pursuit of educational censorship have received broad political attention — as well they should — Abbott’s machinations, and particularly the calamitous Operation Lone Star, have managed to fly somewhat under the radar despite being a massive challenge to federal authority and having led to deaths among both his own National Guard troops and asylum seekers. It cannot stand, and the longer Biden allows it, the worse it will get.
