Ron Brownstein on the defiant red border states:
A pregnant teenager writhing in pain as she suffered a miscarriage while trapped in the barbed wire that Texas has strung along miles of the state’s southern border.
A 4-year-old girl collapsing from heat exhaustion after Texas National Guard members pushed her away from the wire as she tried to cross it with her family.
Texas state troopers receiving orders from their superiors to deny water to migrants in triple-digit heat. Officers on another occasion ordering troopers to drive back into the Rio Grande a group of migrants, including children and babies, that they found huddling alongside a fence by the river.
These are all incidents that a medic in the Texas Department of Public Safety says he witnessed during recent patrols, according to an explosive email published this week by the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News. “I believe we have stepped over a line into the in humane [sic],” the medic, Nicholas Wingate, wrote in the email.
These revelations capture not only the extreme tactics that Texas’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, and state law-enforcement officials are employing against undocumented migrants seeking to cross the U.S. border with Mexico. They also show how aggressively Texas and other Republican-controlled states are maneuvering to seize control from President Joe Biden’s administration over immigration policy. To many immigration experts, these moves by Texas, like the harsh measures against undocumented migrants signed into law this spring by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, push to the edge the legal limits on states’ ability to infringe on federal authority over immigration.
“U.S. immigration law governs the border; Texas law doesn’t govern the border,” David Leopold, a former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told me. Federal law, he noted, establishes a process for handling undocumented migrants seeking asylum in the United States. “It may not be a process that I like, or you like, or people in Texas like, but it’s a process,” Leopold added. “And that process does not include taking a 4-year-old child and throwing that child into the water … or depriving them of water when the temperatures are above 100 degrees. Those are not our values. Those are not our laws.”
Abbott has defended the state’s enforcement effort by arguing that Biden’s immigration policies have exposed his state’s residents to dangerous migrants and drug smuggling, and has endangered migrants themselves by encouraging them to make the arduous trek to the southern border. Responding to Wingate’s email, Abbott’s top law-enforcement officials issued a joint statement in which they maintained that “these tools and strategies—including concertina wire that snags clothing” were necessary to discourage migrants from making “potentially life-threatening and illegal crossings.”
The red-state offensive against undocumented immigration sits at the crossroads of two powerful trends in the Donald Trump–era Republican Party. One is the growing movement in the red states to roll back a wide range of civil rights and liberties, including voting rights, access to abortion, and LGBTQ protections.
The other is an arms race among Republican leaders to adopt ever more militant policies against undocumented immigrants. That dynamic is carrying the party beyond even the hard-line approaches that Trump employed in the White House.
This is where Trump has had a serious effect on the GOP. They’ve always been cruel and racist. But he’s started an arms race that has them trying to one-up each other on how vicious they can be toward some “other” where it’s Muslims as it was in 2016 or back to the perennial Latinos. Needless to say, their hostility to Black people is always obvious.
The lengths they are prepared to go to now are just one step shy of shooting on sight. And invasion of Mexico is on the table, That’s how far they’ve gone.
Both DeSantis and Trump, for instance, have promised that if elected, they will move to end birthright citizenship, the guarantee under the Fourteenth Amendment that anyone born in the United States is automatically an American citizen. In his town-hall appearance on CNN, Trump suggested that he would reinstate his widely condemned policy of separating the children of migrants from their parents at the border to discourage illegal crossings. And he’s promised to “use all necessary state, local, federal, and military resources to carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” That’s an idea Trump often discussed but never risked trying to implement as president.
DeSantis, meanwhile, has indicated that he would authorize federal border-enforcement personnel to use force against suspected drug smugglers. He’s also talked about deploying the Navy and the Coast Guard if Mexico does not act more aggressively to interdict the arrival of chemicals used to manufacture drugs.
Simultaneously, DeSantis and Abbott have been at the forefront of the red-state efforts to seize more control over immigration policy. The legislation DeSantis signed contains sweeping measures to crack down on undocumented migrants, including criminal penalties for anyone providing transportation for such a migrant in Florida.
Abbott, for his part, is building an enforcement apparatus outside the control of the federal agencies legally responsible for managing the border. His efforts represent one of the most tangible—and consequential—manifestations of what I’ve called the red-state drive to build “a nation within a nation” that operates by its own rules and values.
Abbott has not gone as far as conservative activists who claim that the Constitution gives states the right to set their own immigration policies, on the grounds that they are facing an “invasion” of undocumented migrants. During a campaign stop in Texas, DeSantis embraced that fringe legal theory and argued that it provides states, not just the federal government, deportation authority.
This guy will say anything. He is very dangerous and I just hope he is forced to find another career if this one flames out as it looks like it’s doing.
Most immigration-law experts are dubious that even the current conservative Supreme Court majority would agree, and Abbott has not claimed this power. Operation Lone Star, the expansive enforcement effort he launched in 2021, is not attempting to deport undocumented migrants it apprehends in the state. Instead, Texas has returned them to the border, arrested them, or bused them to Democratic-controlled jurisdictions. Abbott’s choice not to claim deportation authority under the invasion theory has generated a steady stream of criticism from some immigration hard-liners.
Yet the revelations in the emails from Wingate, the Texas state trooper, show how far the state has already moved toward usurping federal authority. It has lined its southern border with miles of concertina wire and sunk barrels wrapped in that wire into the river. Recently, the state placed floating buoys in the river to block areas that might be easier and safer to cross. State troopers and National Guard members are also using force to push migrants away from the barbed-wire barricades. Republican governors from nearly a dozen other states have sent law-enforcement personnel, equipment, or both to Texas to support Abbott’s efforts.
“In the federal government’s absence, we, as Governors, must band together to combat President Biden’s ongoing border crisis and ensure the safety and security that all Americans deserve,” Abbott wrote in a letter asking other states to send resources.
Wingate, in his email, noted one consequence of these efforts: “With the [razor] wire running for several miles along the river in areas where it is easier for people to cross. It forces people to cross in other areas that are deeper and not as safe for people carrying kids and bags.”
He recounted the story of a woman who was rescued in the river with one of her children, while another one of them drowned. Wingate also reported that a man suffered “a significant laceration” on his leg while extricating his child from one of the wire-wrapped barrels sunken in the river.
“We have a governor who is literally using the full force of his government to inflict physical harm and even death on people,” Democratic Representative Veronica Escobar of Texas told me. “The fact that he is using the government doesn’t make it any less horrific and it certainly doesn’t make it lawful.”
Beyond the human costs, the red-state border-enforcement effort raises pointed questions about legal authority. Escobar and six other Democratic U.S. representatives from Texas last week wrote to Attorney General Merrick Garland and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, asking them to investigate whether Abbott’s buoys violate U.S. and international law, including the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War. Escobar told me she believes that not only should the Justice Department take legal steps to stop Abbott’s enforcement program; the Biden administration should be “sending in federal personnel to remove all of” the physical barriers Texas has constructed.
The DOJ has filed suit and we can only hope that the Supremes don’t find some “originalist” state sovereignty rationale for allowing these people to run their own border policies. I wouldn’t put it past them.
And Abbott and the others are refusing to back down. They are seceding in slow motion:
Abbott’s willingness to pursue such a militant enforcement campaign, and the decision by so many Republican governors to assist him, provides another measure of the same impulse evident in the proliferating red-state laws restricting or banning abortion, rolling back voting rights, and prohibiting gender-affirming care for transgender minors. All capture a determination to slip the bonds of national authority and impose a set of rules and policies that reflect the priorities and grievances of the primarily older, white, nonurban and Christian coalition that has placed these states’ leaders in power.
That impulse, as Leopold says, is producing a dangerous “balkanization” of the country reminiscent of the years before the Civil War. It has also motivated the leadership of the nation’s second-largest state to conclude that the threat of undocumented immigration is sufficient to justify, both legally and morally, entangling children and pregnant women in coils of razor-sharp wire.
On Friday, after this article was published, the Justice Department disclosed that it had sent a letter to Abbott announcing its intention to sue Texas if he does not commit to removing the floating buoys in the Rio Grande by Monday afternoon eastern time. But the department did not demand in the letter that Texas dismantle any of the barbed wire it has placed on the shore or in the river, and did not disclose any further investigative action into the behavior of Texas law-enforcement officials interacting with migrants. On Twitter, Abbott signaled that he will not comply with the demand to remove the buoys. “We will see you in court, Mr. President.”
He sounds as if he’s looking forward to it for some reason. Maybe he’s been sharing some cigars with Harlan Crow.
This is something we have to keep our eyes on. These radical right wingers are without any real ideology anymore. It’s not really nationalism as we understand it. It’s just about dominance in whatever sphere they happen to operate.