DALLAS — Gov. Greg Abbott lifted the last of the stepped-up vehicle inspections on Friday that snarled traffic at the Texas-Mexico border and drew intense pushback from businesses leaders. But the Republican warned that he would not hesitate to bring back the inspections that created hours of traffic delays if the leaders of four Mexican states that border Texas don’t do their part to slow illegal immigration.
“If there’s not a slowdown in illegal immigration there will be a reimplementation,” Abbott said at a news conference in Weslaco. “A consequence of that is financial pain, that financial pain is necessary to get the public to insist their government leaders, such as presidents of two countries involved, take the action that is needed to solve this problem.”
Texas lost an estimated $477 million a day during Abbott’s enhanced border security checks, says noted and independent Texas economist Ray Perryman, president and CEO of the Perryman Group, citing preliminary data that he plans to issue in a new study next week.
“Our economies are so interdependent that a policy like this makes us more inefficient and forces us to lose some of the benefits of cross-border trade,” Perryman said. “So my message to Governor Abbott is we need to do everything we can to encourage the smooth flow of goods and services across the border rather than something else.”
Abbott, up for reelection, ordered the additional safety inspections after declaring that the Biden administration had failed the country when it comes to border safety. He has said the Texas Department of Public Safety workers inspecting the commercial vehicles would disrupt efforts to smuggle people and drugs across the border.
But the stepped-up safety inspections — which are in addition to other inspections by the federal authorities — increased wait times at the border. U.S. Customs and Border Protection says wait times for commercial crossings were as long as 12 hours, while some truckers interviewed at the crossings say they have had to wait two and three days to cross.
Abbott agreed to ease the inspections in return for security commitments from the governors of all four Mexican states that border Texas.
“We are going to do what is necessary to make sure that we have safe and secure borders where both countries are following the law,” Abbott said.
“If we do see increased trafficking across the border, we will strategically shut down certain bridges,” he said. Abbott acknowledged the move will cause “financial pain,” but he called it necessary to get the public to insist that leaders in Mexico and at the White House “solve this problem.”
He called on President Joe Biden and Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to get to work on solutions to border migration.
Abbott ordered the increased safety inspections April 6 as an expansion of his Operation Lone Star border security effort. The state has spent billions of dollars on the operation, which includes calling up 10,000 Texas National Guard soldiers and sending them to the border along with state troopers.
He backed off of his directive for state troopers to inspect all commercial traffic crossing the border after days of snarled traffic on international bridges and blockades imposed on the Mexico side by angry truckers. Conservative and liberal politicians, trade and business leaders have criticized the stepped-up inspections.
For days, Mexican truckers angered by the slow pace of inspections — most are paid by the number of loads they carry across the border — further disrupted traffic on some of the bridges with their own protest blockades.
Richard Pineda, chair of the Sam Donaldson Communications Studies at the University of Texas at El Paso and longtime Texas political observer, said of Abbott’s tactics: “He’s putting pressure on Mexican governors that he can’t enforce, or even verify, but it gives him short-term political victories because he can say, ‘Look what I did. These Mexican governors fell in line. I did something the federal government wasn’t able to do.'
“I don’t think it’s bullying, exactly. I refer to it as creative politicking intersecting with political theater,” he said.
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