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In an effort to prevent migrant crossings from the southern border, Texas installed a razor wire along its border with New Mexico, not Mexico — upsetting the southwestern state’s governor.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced on September 14 that his state would be “TRIPLING our razor wire border barriers to deny illegal entry into our state and our country.” However, rather than installing the razor wire along the Rio Grande river bank that faces Mexico, KTSM on Tuesday captured footage of Texas Army National Guard troops installing it along a bank that faces New Mexico.
This newly-laid barrier extends from West Paisano Drive to the Texas side of the Anapra, New Mexico, according to the outlet.
New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham, a Democrat, told The Independent in a statement that Republican Abbott’s latest move was a “political stunt” that will have “will have no meaningful impact on our nation’s broken immigration system.”
The Texas governor “seems to be pushing to make Texas its own country without regard for his neighbors or the fact that Texas is already part of a great nation—the United States,” Lujan Grisham said.
She continued: “If he doesn’t think that New Mexico is important to the overall well-being of Texas, then he must be forgetting about the Permian Basin and the oil industry that straddles our two states. I don’t see him laying concertina wire there.” The New Mexico governor then urged Congressional Republicans to “stop holding up the carefully negotiated, bipartisan agreement they are deliberately stalling in Washington at the expense of our entire nation.”
A bipartisan border bill designed to help deal with immigration failed in May after Donald Trump pleaded with his Republican allies in Congress to oppose it. Trump frequently blasts the Biden-Harris administration’s border record, but he reportedly called his GOP loyalists to “kill” the legislation to prevent his Democratic 2024 rivals from getting a “victory” in a key election issue, a source told HuffPost at the time.
The Independent has emailed a representative for Lujan Grisham.
When asked about the new razor wire, Abbott’s press secretary Andrew Mahaleris told The Independent in a statement: “Texas has been so successful in securing our southern border, migrants are now illegally crossing into New Mexico, and then into Texas.”
Mahaleris noted this isn’t the first time that Abbott has directed the Texas National Guard to install a barrier along its neighboring state. Last October, Abbott announced on X that Texas was installing fencing “along NEW Mexico border” because “our barriers around El Paso forced the migrants crossing illegally to enter into New Mexico. They then entered into El Paso from there.”
“This barrier has proven to be effective in deterring migrants who illegally crossed into the United States,” Mahaleris continued. “Under Operation Lone Star, Texas has allocated more than $11 billion of Texas taxpayer money for border security, deploying thousands of Texas National Guard soldiers and DPS troopers, transporting migrants to self-declared sanctuary cities, installing strategic barriers, and building our own border wall. Texas will continue utilizing every tool and strategy to respond to the border crisis and protect Texans.”
Abbott’s aggressive campaign to curb the migrant crisis is not new.
This expansion of the razor wire comes two years after he began busing tens of thousands of migrants across the country, installing a buoy barrier, and reports last year that border agents were ordered to “push the people back into the water to go to Mexico.” At the time a spokesperson for the governor denied the reports of orders to push migrants into the river.
The Justice Department even sued Texas in January over Senate Bill 4, which permits Texas law enforcement officers to arrest migrants for illegal entry and authorizes judges to order migrants to leave the country. Then-US Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta called the law “clearly unconstitutional.”
It was originally set to go into effect in March, but was blocked by a federal district court judge in February.
