No solutions, just theater on Abbott’s border stage
Lights, cameras, action. Surrounded by Texas National Guard members, military vehicles, and Republican counterparts from 11 states, Gov. Greg Abbott cut a dramatic figure last Sunday near downtown Eagle Pass. He was announcing his plan to continue Operation Lone Star, a nearly $10 billion immigration enforcement initiative, and to maintain state control of Shelby Park, a migrant processing site and site of a standoff with the federal government over control of immigration enforcement. He repeated the spectacle Thursday, joining 22 Republican state representatives at the park to announce more guards, razor wire and barriers on the border.
Flanked by the governors, Abbott conjured images of “High Noon” and a bit of “The War of the Worlds.” “We are banding together,” he said, “to fight to ensure that we will be able to maintain our constitutional guarantee that states will be able to defend against any type of imminent danger or invasion.”
The danger in such theater is that during a genuine crisis, like the current migrant surge, it eclipses the problem’s real-life complexities.
Immigration trends emerge from a welter of pushes and pulls. Recent push factors include historic levels of human movement worldwide, widespread economic and physical insecurity, and commercialization of migrant trafficking. Treating the vast U.S./ Mexico border as a permanent war zone is no way to adapt to these developments. We need sophisticated planning, not razor wire to snare desperate swimmers.
Dramatics have little impact on immigration’s pull
Dramatics also are useless in reducing most immigration pull factors. Abbott is tapping into legitimate frustration with Congress and with immigration and asylum laws as they now stand. Migrants, who are rational actors, have quickly learned that requesting asylum means they can’t be deported, and that they may work until their case arrives in the hopelessly backlogged courts. After a year in the United States, virtually no undocumented person who has not committed a crime gets deported.
For more than two decades both Democrats and Republicans in Congress, presidents from both parties, and industries that quietly thrive on low-cost immigrant labor have been shamefully passive in modernizing our immigration and asylum system.
But political theatrics in Texas won’t change that. And they steal the spotlight from Texans’ nuanced experiences with migration. Many abhor the prospect of a chaotic border – but are shocked at the preventable suffering of ordinary people struggling to get here. Most Texans want rule of law. They also hire, fall in love with or may be related to undocumented immigrants.
Despite the optics, Operation Lone Star has been a bust
Above all, Texans want government to make practical improvements in daily life. And despite the optics of armed guards, shipping containers and rolls of razor wire, Operation Lone Star has been a bust, according to a July 2023 Wall Street Journal report. Since the program started, the paper reported, the border area where Operation Lone Star focused most resources saw the fastest rise in illegal border crossings. In that time frame, Operation Lone Star officials conducted only 1 percent of all migrant encounters, totaling 11,000 in contrast to the Border Patrol’s 850,000.
Meanwhile, migrant crossings have gone down across the border in recent weeks, according to the Associated Press. Arrests for illegal crossings hit a historic peak of 249,785 in December 2023. Then they fell by more than half in the first two weeks of January – a drop U.S. Customs and Border Control and Protection credits partly to enhanced cooperation with the Mexican government.
Abbott’s border events, meanwhile, are choreographed to trigger conflict. The Eagle Pass visits followed a series of legal clashes with the federal government over the right to enforce immigration laws. In January, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that federal authorities may remove the coils of razor wire Operation Lone Star strung along the Rio Grande to repel migrants.
The ruling followed an emergency request filed by the Biden administration, arguing that Texas was blocking U.S. Border Patrol agents from processing newly arrived migrants at Shelby Park and from giving them medical attention.
Abbott has announced he will resist the ruling, claiming Texas’ constitutional right to defend itself from “invasion.” But there’s nothing ambiguous about the principle of pre-emption: the understanding that under the Constitution, federal authority reigns supreme over state law when it comes to immigration matters.
If Abbott continues to defy the law it could be the first step to a constitutional crisis, said Muzaffar Chishti, senior fellow at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute. Shelby Park, he said, may be the ground zero for a state/federal standoff reminiscent of desegregation clashes of the past. Such a confrontation, either on the border or at the Supreme Court, would bring more, not less, expense and mayhem to Texans.
Already, Abbot’s defiance seems to exert a gravitational pull. The day before his appearance in Eagle Pass, a convoy arrived 20 miles away to protest migrant crossings, and a migrant processing facility was evacuated when the FBI received threats from known extremists. For months, Americans across the country have shuddered at reports of children and pregnant women pushed back in the Rio Grande, and of medical personnel on Texas soil barred from treating migrants in need.
So far, there has been no violence between Texas and the federal government. With billions spent and little to show for it, Abbott’s performance on the border is a waste of Texans’ money. If he incites constitutional crisis, or permits violence, it will be a horror show.