That border wall plan isn’t for Texas

Last week, as Texans were told to raise their thermostats, unplug electronics and avoid running loads of laundry that might strain our state’s fragile power grid, Gov. Greg Abbott decided the real infrastructure vulnerabilities were a couple hundred miles away.

“Texas will build a border wall in our state to help secure our border,” Abbott intoned, surrounded by cheering Republican lawmakers eager to revive Donald Trump’s border crusade.

No doubt Abbott is playing politics with his ludicrous gambit for Texas to build its own border wall, a half-baked, GoFundMe effort that should make all Texans cringe. Still, Abbott’s acts of political theater at the border, advancing his 2022 reelection bid and possible White House aspirations, have costly implications.

Although he is inviting private donations for the wall, the governor is using real taxpayer money — moving $250 million out of the state prison budget — to get the ball rolling, starting with hiring a project manager. At his behest, officials have emptied the state prison in Dilley, about an hour’s drive southwest of San Antonio, so the facility can be used to detain immigrants who trespass across fenced areas or commit other transgressions — with Texas taxpayers funding that lockup, too.

And while Abbott says he wants to work with Texans eager to donate their land for a border wall, many landowners along the border have fought such a project for years — meaning Texas would face years of expensive litigation if it tried to make a border wall a reality.

By the end of the Trump administration, the federal government was mired in lawsuits with more than 215 landowners in the Rio Grande Valley who refused to allow a border wall across their property, according to the Texas Civil Rights Project.

Texas has the largest stretch of unwalled border with Mexico for good reasons. The twists and turns of the Rio Grande aren’t easily walled off. Doing so in some areas would block the flow of wildlife and cause flooding, likely violating a 1970 treaty that requires the Rio Grande floodplain to remain open to both sides of the border.

Erosion has taken such a toll on a privately funded stretch of wall in Mission that experts last year said the wall was in danger of collapse. And vast swaths of Texas’ borderlands — from the breathtaking cliffs of Santa Elena Canyon to the unforgiving terrain of the Chinati Mountains and the Chihuahuan Desert — have formidable natural barriers that make man-made ones unnecessary.

Trump never understood any of that. But the governor of Texas does.

Nonetheless, Abbott is pressing ahead with a project that would bear an exorbitant price tag — $26.5 million per mile in some parts of Texas, according to federal lawmakers. Yet as this editorial board has repeatedly pointed out, a border wall will not stop the majority of immigrants who are here illegally, as they are people who came to the U.S. legally and then overstayed their visas.

It will not stop the vast majority of illegal drugs, which are seized at guarded ports of entry, not from people slipping across unwalled borderlands. And it will not stop migrants from arriving and making their lawful request for asylum, which the courts ultimately sort out.

We recognize the spike in border crossings in recent months has strained South Texas communities. Sheriffs and ranchers describe human smuggling on a previously unseen-scale: Daily high-speed chases of coyotes, the destruction of fences and pastures, the discoveries of bodies of people who perished in the grueling trek. It is clear President Joe Biden’s administration has not done enough to manage the problem.

The question facing Abbott is whether to reach out to the feds in an effort to help, or whether to exploit the situation for his own political gain. Lamentably he has chosen the latter. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick went even further, baselessly declaring that “we are being invaded” — echoing the language of the gunman who shot and killed Hispanic shoppers at an El Paso Walmart in 2019.

This is not the path to making Texans safer.

Instead of biting at Biden’s heels with a rival plan for border security, Abbott should be tending to the needs of Texans.