Texas governor defies federal order to remove anti-migrant buoys from river
The Republican governor of Texas refused to comply with federal instructions to remove floating barriers installed in the Rio Grande as a way to stop migrants reaching US soil.
“Texas will fully utilise its constitutional authority to deal with the crisis you have caused,” Greg Abbott wrote to Joe Biden in a letter reported by CNN and other outlets on Monday.
“Texas will see you in court, Mr President.”
It was the latest confrontational move by a governor who for more than two years has escalated measures to keep migrants from entering the US, pushing legal boundaries along the 1,200-mile border between Texas and Mexico.
Blowback over the tactics is widening, including from within Texas and particularly in light of a state trooper’s account of officers denying migrants water in 100F (37.7C) heat and being told to push children into the river, and razor wire leaving asylum seekers bloodied.
The Mexican government, Texas residents and the Biden administration are all pushing back.
Last week, the US justice department told Texas to remove the river barriers – which are topped with razor wire – from the waters separating Texas from Mexico, citing federal laws against obstructing waterways and imposing a Monday deadline.
On Monday, Abbott said that in refusing to comply, he was “assert[ing] Texas’s sovereign interest in protecting [its] borders” in his role as the “commander-in-chief of [the] state’s militia”.
Repeating a common Republican talking point, the governor also wrote to Biden: “If you truly care about human life, you must begin enforcing federal immigration laws. By doing so, you can help me stop migrants from wagering their lives in the waters of the Rio Grande.”
Saying migrants could attempt to use legitimate ports of entry, as reported by Spectrum News, Abbott said: “While I share the humanitarian concerns noted in your lawyers’ letter, Mr President, your finger points in the wrong direction.
“Neither of us wants to see another death in the Rio Grande … Yet your open-border policies encourage migrants to risk their lives by crossing illegally through the water, instead of safely and legally at a port of entry. Nobody drowns on a bridge.”
A White House spokesperson told CNN Abbott’s refusal to comply over the river barriers was “dangerous and unlawful … making it hard for the men and women of border patrol to do their jobs of securing the border”.
Also calling Abbott’s actions “cruel … putting both migrants and border agents in danger”, the spokesperson said other Republicans, including the Texas senator Ted Cruz, had obstructed federal efforts to address problems at the southern border.
Criticism of Abbott is growing within his own state.
Speaking to the Associated Press, David Donatti, an attorney for the Texas American Civil Liberties Union, said: “There are so many ways that what Texas is doing right now is just flagrantly illegal.”
Aron Thorn, an attorney with the Texas Civil Rights Project, described to the same outlet “a very strong correlation” between Abbott’s border policy and “the Trump and post-Trump era in which most of the Trump administration’s immigration policy was aggressive and extreme and very violative of people’s rights, and very focused on making the political point.
“The design of this is the optics and the amount of things that they sacrifice for those optics now is quite extraordinary.”
In Eagle Pass, on the banks of the Rio Grande, Jessie Fuentes, a kayaker, has filed a lawsuit over work done on the river.
Citing border security measures including the floating barriers and shipping containers and razor wire placed along riverbanks cleared of vegetation, Fuentes recently told the Eagle Pass city council: “The river is a federally protected river by so many federal agencies, and I just don’t know how it happened.”
A council member, Elias Diaz, told the AP: “I feel like the state government has kind of bypassed local government in a lot of different ways. And so I felt powerless at times.”
Hugo Urbina, a farmer whose land abuts the river in Eagle Pass, said he supported efforts to reduce border crossings via the waters of the Rio Grande. But Urbina also said Abbott and his administration “do whatever it is that they want … breaking the law and … making your citizens feel like they’re second-hand citizens”.
The Texas land office has said it will permit “vegetation management” on the banks of the river as part of anti-migration efforts. The state military department has cleared out carrizo cane, which the land office has called an invasive plant. Environmental experts are concerned such changes to the landscape will affect the flow of the river.
Tom Vaughan, a retired professor and co-founder of the Rio Grande International Study Center, said: “As far as I know, if there’s flooding in the river, it’s much more severe in Piedras Negras” – on the Mexican side – “than it is in Eagle Pass because that’s the lower side of the river.
“And so next time the river really gets up, it’s going to push a lot of water over on the Mexican side, it looks like to me.”
Source: The Guardian US
