A lot of attention-grabbing bluster from the incumbent governor who’s seeking reelection this year. And the details of his plan make clear that attention was the intent. The migrants who volunteered to go on the bus have already been processed by the federal government, according to Abbott’s office, and were released in accordance with standard procedure. Presumably many of them were planning to come to the East Coast anyway.
And then, just to put a fine point on Abbott’s intent, there’s the issue of where the bus stopped when it arrived in D.C. on Wednesday: just outside the Fox News studio in the city. The network quickly hyped the arrival as an “exclusive.”
When Donald Trump left office at the beginning of last year, one large chunk of his rhetorical repertoire was up for grabs. He came to the White House pledging to address immigration and to build a wall on the border with Mexico. With his departure — and the increase in immigration that began a few months before he left — there was an opportunity for someone else to take up the fight. It made sense that it would be a border-state governor and Abbott is up for reelection, so here we are.
The bus gimmick is neither the only nor the most significant part of Abbott’s effort.
As those migrants zipped off to D.C., for example, trucks hoping to enter Texas from Mexico were being slowed down dramatically. Abbott implemented a policy that mandates an additional inspection by state officials after federal inspectors have cleared semis for entry. The result has been a dramatic slowdown in the transit of goods into Texas, with wait times to enter rising from about three hours to more than 12.
In response, truckers in Mexico have blocked traffic at a major entry point into Texas, hoping to force Abbott to rescind his order. The state’s agriculture commissioner Sid Miller (R) sent Abbott a letter Tuesday calling for the enhanced inspections to end.
“[T]his policy will hurt Texas and American consumers by driving up already skyrocketing food prices, worsening ongoing supply chain disruptions, causing massive produce shortages, and saddling Texas and American companies with untold losses,” Miller wrote. He later said that the policy was unlikely to achieve its goal of significantly curtailing illegal immigration. Instead, Miller dubbed it “simply political theater.”
Polling by the University of Texas at Austin this year found that Texans view Abbott’s handling of the border a bit more favorably than they do other issues such as education or crime and far more favorably than things such as his handling of the state’s electrical grid. In other words, continuing to focus on the border plays to Abbott’s strengths as the Republican primary and then the general election approach.
Last year, Abbott announced a border-enforcement program called Operation Lone Star. It deployed state law enforcement and members of the National Guard to border regions “to combat the smuggling of people and drugs into Texas,” as a news release from the governor’s office put it. But a few months after the program began, it was expanded to include arrests for trespassing — arrests that now make up the majority of detentions according to reporting from ProPublica. At times, those stopped under the program were seeking asylum in the United States. But because they arrived in the United States on private land, they were arrested instead of beginning the legal process to potentially gain citizenship.
The purported rationale for all of this is the increase in migrants from Mexico. From November 2020 to February 2022, the number of people apprehended in border regions that include portions of Texas increased from under 45,000 to over 97,000 — more than double. But, in keeping with the way critics of the Biden administration have relied on inflated or misleading top-line numbers to create an exaggerated sense of how many migrants remain in the country, Abbott’s team has itself offered some egregiously misleading figures.
Appearing on “Fox & Friends Weekend” on Sunday, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R) made one of the more ridiculous claims in the recent history of immigration fearmongering. Patrick claimed that based on numbers they had “created here in Texas,” almost “20 percent of all Americans will be here illegally.” The show’s hosts dutifully “wow”-ed.
But it’s nonsense. That would mean more than 60 million undocumented immigrants in the United States — twice the current population of Texas. This claim is indefensible, based on outlier analyses of the number of undocumented people in the country (in reality about 11 million) and the same sort of misrepresentation of apprehension data mentioned above. Patrick proceeded to loop this into the casual version of the toxic, racist White replacement theory that’s become popular on the right, claiming that this was a function of “Democrats and the left want[ing] to take over the country.”
Again, this is Abbott’s second-in-command, insisting that immigration trends were so dire that 1 in 5 residents of the United States would not only be immigrants but would be here illegally. (In reality, most immigrants are here legally.) It’s rhetoric that can be used to prop up things such as Operation Lone Star or making trucks idle in Del Rio while Texas inspectors comb their trailers for possible migrants.
The politics are simple. Trump’s loss gave an opportunity for other politicians to consume the oxygen of immigration politics. The increase in apprehensions raised the issue’s salience and Biden’s unpopularity made him a useful foil. So Abbott, looking at least at November if not more cautiously at 2024, eagerly took up the cause.
Abbott did scale back some of the border inspection process at a news conference Wednesday. But, with reporters assembled, he took an opportunity to make some familiar rhetorical points about the purported dire threats associated with migrants.
Abbott now blaming Biden for the border blockade. He’s going on at length about cartels, rapes, fentanyl, and crime by undocumented immigrants.
— Forrest Wilder (@Forrest4Trees) April 13, 2022
