Texas Gov. Greg Abbott Claims First Win in Title 42 Border Battle

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) claimed victory Wednesday after the governor of Mexico’s Nuevo Leon province promised to curb illegal migration in exchange for Abbott ending stringent safety checks on the trucks used to export goods from the province’s factories and farms.

“Today is a historic day where two governors are showing how to lead on border issues,” Abbot told a press conference where he denounced President Joe Biden’s easy migration rules and his plan to remove the Title 42 legal barrier on May 23.

Abbott said:

Governor [Samuel] Garcia [Sepulveda] and I reached an agreement today … Governor Garcia has begun and will continue enhancing border security enforcement measures on the Nuevo Leon side of the border, both at ports of entry and alongside the Rio Grande River, to prevent illegal immigration …  The Texas Department of Public Safety can return to its previous practice [and] The effect of this will be that the bridge from Nuevo Leone and Texas will return to normal, effective immediately. Right now. It will remain that way as long as the Nuevo Leon executes this historic agreement.

The deal reopens just one of several border crossings that have been clogged by the governor’s policy of stringent safety checks. Abbot says he has begun negotiations with other Mexican governors:

I look forward to working with all of them toward achieving results similar to what we are achieving today with Governor Garcia. Until, however, those agreements are reached with those states, the Texas Department of Public Safety will continue to thoroughly inspect vehicles entering into the United States from every Mexican state except Nuevo Leon.

The El Paso Times reported after the Nuevo Leon bridges were reopened::

[Mexican] truckers continued to wait hours to cross at the Ysleta and the Bridge of the Americas ports of entry in El Paso.

Truckers said they usually spend two or three hours crossing into El Paso from Juárez. After Gov. Greg Abbott announced new Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) trooper inspections at ports of entry, truckers this week suddenly found themselves in 10-plus hour lines.

[…]

Even after the blockades lifted, inspections continued to stymie commercial truck traffic in much of the borderland, with no end in sight. Trucks waited in line for their turn at two inspection bays at the DPS station exiting the Bridge of the Americas. With inspections lasting 20 minutes or more, the line advanced at a crawl.

“We are seeing delays that will be felt across the country,” John Esparza, president of the Texas Trucking Association, told the Washington Post. “There’s the refrigerated segment of trucking, there’s household goods, forestry, fuel tankers, commodities for trade goods — this is about General Motors, Ford and everything coming out of Mexico, our trade partner.”

Abbott’s Democratic rival in the pending election, Beto O’Rourke, accused the governor of “killing businesses”:

Biden’s pro-migration border agency also complained, saying:

The Laredo Field Office has seen a significant increase in commercial wait times at ports of entry since April 8, 2022, when inspections by Texas DPS began. Hildalgo/Pharr which averages a 63 minute wait time, reached a peak wait of 320 minutes and experienced a 35% drop in commercial traffic. Currently, protests being conducted in Mexico blocking access to the bridge, purportedly over these Texas DPS inspections, have reduced commercial traffic by 100%.

But Abbott is facing down the criticism from business groups and from the White House.

“I’ll also know well the frustration of my fellow Texans — and my fellow Americans — caused by the Biden administration, not securing our borders,” Abbott responded, adding:

The ultimate way to end the clog at the border is for President Biden to do his job and to secure the border. If you want relief from the clogged border, you need to call President Biden and tell him to maintain the Title 42 expulsion policy that has been in place for years.

You need to tell President Biden to aggressively enforce the Remain in Mexico policy. You need to call your member of Congress and insist that they hold the Biden administration accountable. And you need to demand that President Biden enforce the immigration laws that have already been passed by the United States Congress.

You also need to contact President Lopez Obrador and urge him to collaborate with Texas to end the influx of cartel activity from Mexico into Texas.

“Clogged bridges can end only through the type of collaboration that we are demonstrating today. Between Texas and Nuevo Leon,” Abbott said, adding, “Until then, Texas will use its own strategies to secure the border and continue to negotiate with Mexico to seek solutions.”

Pro-migration groups — including David Bier at the open-borders Cato Institute — complained about Texas’s efforts to curb the federal policy of extracting migrants from poor countries:

“An explicitly illegal purpose. How is #Biden not suing right now? … Why are truckers not suing? What is going on?” Bier tweeted. 

Since at least 1990, the D.C. establishment has used a wide variety of excuses and explanations — for example, “Nation of Immigrants” — to justify its policy of extracting tens of millions of migrants and visa workers from poor countries to serve as workers, consumers, and renters for various U.S. investors and CEOs.

The self-serving economic strategy of extraction migration has no stopping point. It is brutal to ordinary Americans because it cuts their career opportunities, shrinks their salaries and wages, raises their housing costs, and has shoved at least ten million American men out of the labor force.

Extraction migration also distorts the economy, and curbs Americans’ productivity, partly because it allows employers to use stoop labor instead of machines.

Migration also reduces voters’ political clout, undermines employees’ workplace rights, and widens the regional wealth gaps between the Democrats’ coastal states and the Republicans’ Heartland states.