Texas Governor Greg Abbott met President Joe Biden at the El Paso Airport and handed him a scathing letter regarding the growing border crisis. Biden landed in El Paso for a brief visit before heading to Mexico City.
Abbott wrote, “Your visit to our southern border with Mexico today is $20 billion too little and two years too late. Moreover, your visit avoids the sites where mass illegal immigration occurs and sidesteps the thousands of angry Texas property owners whose lives have been destroyed by your border policies.”
“This chaos is the direct result of your failure to enforce the immigration laws that Congress enacted,” the Texas governor continued. “Your open-border policies have emboldened the cartels, who grow wealthy by trafficking deadly fentanyl and even human beings.”
Biden arrived in El Paso on Sunday for his first-ever visit to the Texas-Mexico border. While the El Paso Sector is currently the busiest of the nine southwest border sectors, the president was not able to see much of the chaos and inhumanity created by his border security and immigration policies. In the days leading up to the presidential border visit, Border Patrol agents and El Paso police created a Potemkin village of sorts by rounding up migrants who camped on the streets in freezing conditions after Biden administration policies prohibited them from entering federally funded shelters.
In the letter to the president, Abbott accused Biden of violating his “constitutional obligation to defend the States against invasion through faithful execution of federal laws.”
Abbott’s scathing comments to the president continued:
Halfway through your presidency, though, I can finally welcome you to the border. When you finish the photo-ops in a carefully stage-managed version of El Paso, you have a job to do:
- You must comply with the many statutes mandating that various categories of aliens “shall” be detained, and end the practice of unlawfully paroling aliens en masse.
- You must stop sandbagging the implementation of the Remain-in-Mexico policy and Title 42 expulsions, and fully enforce those measures as the federal courts have ordered you to do.
- You must aggressively prosecute illegal entry between ports of entry, and allow ICE to remove illegal immigrants in accordance with existing federal laws.
- You must immediately resume construction of the border wall in the State of Texas, using the billions of dollars Congress has appropriated for that purpose.
- You must designate the Mexican drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations.
When asked by reporters in El Paso about President Biden’s reaction to their conversation on the tarmac, the governor responded, “He said he wanted to work with us on it.”
Bob Price serves as associate editor and senior news contributor for the Breitbart Texas-Border team. He is an original member of the Breitbart Texas team. Price is a regular panelist on Fox 26 Houston’s What’s Your Point? Sunday-morning talk show. Follow him on Twitter @BobPriceBBTX.