WASHINGTON – Texas Gov. Greg Abbott shrugged off a rebuke for calling the surge of illegal border crossings an “invasion,” ramping up the rhetoric Thursday by warning that migrants in “military style gear” are now sneaking into Texas.
The governor’s office pointed to news reports showing migrants dressed in camouflage, captured last February through May in remote parts of West Texas. None of the reports indicate weapons.
Migrants and smugglers have used camouflage clothing to avoid detection for years. Examples abound of captured migrants in camouflage during the tenure of former President Donald Trump, though Abbott indicated it’s a new phenomenon during an interview on CNN in which he accused President Joe Biden of ignoring pleas for help in sealing the border.
“The primary way that we see the people we are encountering today to be different than those we have seen in the past is those who come in military-style gear, prepared to weather whatever type of challenges they’re going to face as they cross the border and get to a further destination later on,” Abbott said. “We believe that these are people who are working perhaps in collaboration with the cartels, or who may have nefarious things they want to accomplish in the United States.”
Abbott met Biden on the tarmac Sunday in El Paso and handed him a letter that accused him of violating his “constitutional obligation to defend the States against invasion.”
On Tuesday, a Dallas Morning News editorial criticized Abbott for the letter, arguing that while much of his critique of federal actions and policy has merit, he “repeats ugly rhetoric characterizing the border crisis in military terms that risk portraying all migrants as enemy combatants.”
The editorial also chided Abbott for “playing for the cameras” and “antagonizing the Biden administration” for two years, “which makes it unlikely that Texas will improve its cooperation with the White House.”
Pressed by CNN’s Jake Tapper to respond to the editorial, Abbott said he was simply invoking a clause in the U.S. Constitution that gives states authority to defend themselves in case of invasion.
“Jake, if this is not an invasion, what is?” he said, adding, “The drug cartels are invading the United States of America. And if Americans don’t know that, they need to wake up.... Texas law enforcement alone has seized enough fentanyl… to kill every man, woman and child in the entire United States of America. That could destroy us as a country. And it’s Texas, not the United States, that is stepping up and trying to do something about it.”
The letter he hand-delivered Sunday was his eighth request for federal help from Biden, Abbott said, adding that he’s also pleaded with Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
“He has refused to provide any assistance whatsoever,” Abbott said of the president. “All on deaf ears. Texas has been left alone as some frontier outpost for us to have to grapple with, ourselves, the record-breaking volume of millions of people coming across the border a year.”
For fiscal 2022, Customs and Border Protection reported 98 encounters with foreigners on the terrorist watch list who had crossed the U.S.-Mexico border between ports of entry. That’s a record.
All were detained, though many Republicans cite the figure as evidence of an “open border.”
“Very dangerous people who are coming across our border that the Biden administration is doing nothing to impede their entry into the United States,” Abbott said. “If we apprehended that many people on the terrorist watch list, think how many who paid more who evaded apprehension whatsoever who may be wandering across the country trying to do evil to our country.”
