Texas’s barbaric treatment of migrants
Governor Greg Abbott of Texas has spent billions of dollars on Operation Lone Star, a two-year effort to use state law enforcement personnel to secure the US-Mexico border with the ultimate goal of stopping migrants from seeking asylum in America. And whose money is financing the operation’s inhumane policies and the unimaginable harm they have caused migrants? Texas taxpayers.
The latest policies under Abbott’s operation are appalling for their cruelty. Last week, thee Houston Chronicle revealed that a state trooper emailed a superior on July 3 to raise alarms about orders they had received: State troopers were told to push small children and nursing babies back into the Rio Grande and deny water to asylum seekers despite Texas’s extreme heat. The trooper wrote that those orders have “stepped over a line into the inhumane.” The Wall Street Journal reviewed and confirmed the trooper’s email, which included incidents in Eagle Pass, where authorities have installed miles of razor wires and deployed dozens of huge orange buoys in the middle of the Rio Grande in recent weeks.
Just how inhumane can it get? Per the email, there was a pregnant teen who was doubled over in pain and having a miscarriage while stuck in razor wire late last month; a 4-year-old girl who was pushed back from the wire by troopers and passed out from the heat shortly after; and a 15-year-old boy who broke his leg trying to avoid the wire. The trooper wrote that the wire has increased the risk of drownings because it forces migrants into deeper parts of the river. In the first week of July, five people drowned in the Eagle Pass area, according to the officer.
Texas’s increasingly barbaric treatment of migrants at the border reminds me of the boat tragedy that unfolded off the Greek coast last month. The boat, carrying up to 750 Pakistani, Syrian, Egyptian, and Palestinian refugees and migrants, capsized; only 104 people were rescued. Greek authorities have been criticized because they allegedly didn’t do enough to save people. A Boston resident who volunteers to welcome newly arrived migrants to the area recently made a parallel between our own border issues and the European ones. She told me, “We have our own Mediterranean here.” She’s right.
The good news is that the Biden administration sued Abbott on Monday over the big orange buoys, claiming that the state unlawfully installed them. Last week, the US Department of Justice sent a letter to Abbott and the state’s interim attorney general saying that the state’s actions “violate federal law, raise humanitarian concerns, present serious risks to public safety and the environment, and may interfere with the federal government’s ability to carry out its official duties.” Abbott staunchly defended his hardline policies of deterrence in a response letter to Biden, the contents of which are an almost-perfect example of gaslighting. “It has been under your watch that migrants have suffered an unprecedented crisis of inhumanity,” Abbott wrote. So, following that argument, one is to assume that Abbott’s reaction to Biden’s inhumane border policies is ... to inflict more harm to migrants? Got it.
The kicker is that Abbott’s cruelty is being financed by Texas taxpayers. Operation Lone Star, most of it based on deterrence, has cost $4.5 billion so far in various border security efforts — an area solely within the purview of the federal government, by the way — and there is no evidence that they’ve had an impact on migration. Texas lawmakers have reportedly allocated an additional $5.1 billion for the ill-advised operation in the next two years. Some of those funds have been pulled from the Texas criminal justice system.
It bears saying it again: Immigration policies based on deterrence do not work, as has been proven repeatedly. Deterrence creates border chaos and that’s all Republicans want. Now Abbott is unnecessarily and viciously upping the ante in the GOP’s perpetual war against migrants to provoke a fight with the Biden administration. In doing so, all he wants is to score political points. This isn’t to say that Abbott’s actions should be dismissed and ignored as performative; on the contrary.
The Biden administration’s lawsuit against Abbott is a step in the right direction. We’ve passed the relatively innocent era when migrants were merely exploited as political pawns. Then family separation set a new low bar. Now the new tactic is cruel physical abuse under Texas’s blazing sun.