DOJ sues Texas over border crackdown
What happened
The Justice Department sued Texas this week over its installation of a 1,000-foot chain of wrecking ball–size buoys in the Rio Grande, part of Gov. Greg Abbott’s increasingly aggressive attempt to block migrants from crossing into the state from Mexico. The lawsuit argues that federal approval is needed for structures placed in waterways and that the barrier makes it more likely that migrants will drown while trying to cross the river. The 4-foot-high buoys are just one element of Abbott’s Operation Lone Star, a $4 billion anti-migrant initiative that has seen the banks of the Rio Grande lined with stackedup shipping containers and rolls of razor wire. Abbott said the buoy barrier was saving lives by discouraging migrants from entering the often-treacherous waters, and pledged that Texas would “continue to deploy every strategy to protect Texans and Americans.”
The lawsuit comes just days after the Houston Chronicle reported that state troopers and National Guard soldiers sent to the border by Abbott had been ordered to push back migrants—including children—into the Rio Grande and to deny them water in tripledigit heat. Those allegations were detailed in an email sent to a superior by a trooper-medic, who listed the distressing scenes he’d witnessed at the border. They included a woman miscarrying while tangled in razor wire, a teenager breaking his leg while trying to walk around obstacles in the river, and a 4-year-old who attempted to cross the wire fainting from heat exhaustion after being pushed back by National Guard soldiers. The wire and buoys, the trooper wrote, are “nothing but an inhumane trap.”
What the columnists said
These injuries were caused by Texas Republicans’ seeking “Chuck Norris solutions to intractable problems,” said Bridget Grumet in the Austin American-Statesman. Laying mile after mile of razor wire and blocking passable sections of the Rio Grande won’t deter “deeply desperate people” fleeing horrors at home. It will simply push them toward more dangerous places to cross the border. “That is not to say we should be a nation of open borders.” But “militaristic solutions” will never solve a “humanitarian crisis.”
If the trooper’s allegations are true, “it’s an outrage,” said the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in an editorial. But “critics are already wildly overreaching,” with some making evidence-free claims that the orders came from Abbott himself. Texas will inevitably make mistakes as it tries to “create order out of a chaos it did not create.” Securing the border should be the Border Patrol’s job, but the Biden administration isn’t stepping up. Has the state gone too far? Yes. But “everyone who brought us to this point” bears some responsibility.
Texas is “at the forefront of the red-state efforts” to seize control of immigration policy, said Ronald Brownstein in The Atlantic. Federal law establishes how to police the border and handle undocumented migrants, but Abbott and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis are pushing ever more draconian anti-migrant state policies to appease their older, whiter, nonurban bases. If the Biden administration fails to assert primacy on immigration and lets Operation Lone Star continue unchecked, “more abuses may be inevitable.”