In an appearance on Fox News Channel’s “On the Record,” Texas gubernatorial hopeful and Attorney General Greg Abbott doubled down on his statement questioning the Bureau of Land Management’s alleged efforts to seize 90,000 acres on along the Red River on the Texas-Oklahoma border.
“This is alarming and disturbing because private property owners in Texas have owned this land that abuts up against the Red River for generations,” Abbott said. “They have cultivated it and they have produced off of it now. And now seemingly out of the blue, the federal government is coming in and trying to seemingly stake a claim to what we think is private property owned by Texans. And so what we are doing is firing off this letter to the Bureau of Land Management to find out exactly what it is they are looking into because we feel that for one, at a minimum, they are overreaching, trying to grab land that belongs to Texans. Or worse, they are violating due process rights by just claiming that this land suddenly belongs to the federal government, swiping it away from our Texans.”
Abbott said if the BLM decided to go forward with any plans involving this property, the state would wage a battle in the courts.
“We will be seeing them in court because this is land that belongs to Texans and we are going to be fighting for those Texans and their private property rights in a court of law,” he said. “And we believe the courts will favor Texas in this fight.”
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