Abbott: Use Trump border protocols

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott was on national television over the weekend, pressuring the Biden administration to do more to stem the tide of unaccompanied children coming across the Texas border.

Abbott said he believes the nation is going to have a “far higher” number of children in detention facilities this summer than the 35,000 the federal government is projecting.

“This problem will continue to get worse because of the policies that have been adopted by the Biden administration,” Abbott said.

Asked what Biden could do, Abbott told Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace that he has three ideas that would work.

“What the president could do is to immediately put back in place the remain in Mexico protocols that were established in the prior administration,” Abbott said.

The remain-in-mexico policy allowed the government to return certain asylum-seekers to Mexico to wait through the duration of their cases pending in the U.S. immigration court system.

The remain-in-mexico policy was aimed at single adult males, single adult females, and family units and did not apply to unaccompanied children.

Abbott said Biden should also restart the construction of the border wall that was still being built in January along parts of the Texas border just before Biden took office. Former President Donald Trump stood along uncompleted sections of the border wall in Hidalgo County in January just before leaving office, calling on the Biden administration to keep building the fence, which currently has large gaps in it.

While more than 400 miles of the border wall were completed during Trump's tenure, only 30 miles covered new areas, according to a Customs and Border Protection report. Most of the work had replaced older fences and barriers, largely from El Paso to California.

When Trump took office, the nation had 654 miles of various fencing along the 1,954-mile U.S. border with Mexico from California to Texas. In just Texas, there were about 100 miles of fencing and other barriers.

Finally, Abbott said Biden has to be more forceful in telling potential border crossers not to come to the United States. Biden has tried to do just that. “I can say quite clearly: Don't come,” Biden told ABC in an interview. “We're in the process of getting set up, don't leave your town or city or community.”