Texas installs triple barbed wire on US-Mexico border to protest Kamala Harris’ candidacy

Greg Abbott has a major weapon at his disposal and never hesitates to use it: the U.S.-Mexico border. His crusade against the federal government is based on tactics that instrumentalize immigration. If something happens in Washington that displeases the Republican governor of Texas, he directs his frustration to the border. He has now done so following the all-but-certain nomination of Kamala Harris as the new Democratic candidate for president. “Joe Biden has now endorsed and fully supports his “Borders Czar” Kamala Harris to be the Democrat candidate for president. I think I will need to triple the border wall, razor wire barriers and National Guard on the border,” he tweeted on X on Sunday. Not 24 hours later, Abbott posted a tweet with two images showing National Guard soldiers installing triple-stranded barbed wire along the border between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez.

“Texas holds the line against illegal crossings,” the governor added in the post. Abbott is one of a long list of Republicans allied with former president and Republican nominee Donald Trump who since Sunday have attacked Biden’s decision to withdraw from the campaign and anoint Harris as his successor. The barrage of criticism has focused mainly on the role Harris has played in the immigration policies of the Biden administration. Republicans have labeled her a “border czar,” a position the vice president has never held.

Harris has never overseen border or immigration policy for the Democratic administration. She did have an immigration-related assignment, but she has not been involved in border oversight, as Abbott and other Republicans claim, and she has never been designated as “border czar.” Early in Biden’s term, the president tasked the vice president with coordinating diplomatic relations with the so-called Northern Triangle of Central America — El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras — to address the “root causes” of migration from these three countries. The idea of the strategy was to improve economic and security conditions by creating jobs, fighting corruption, improving human and labor rights, and reducing violence to curb northward migration.

Thus, Harris’ work around migration has taken place thousands of miles south of the Mexican border, for which responsibility rests primarily with Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and his department, which oversees the country’s three main immigration agencies.

However, the facts seem to matter little to Abbott. In another post on his social media last weekend, he stated: “‘Border Czar’ Kamala Harris had one job: secure the border. On her watch, more illegal immigrants have crossed the border than EVER before — including known terrorists and criminals.”

The governor has been blaming the federal government for the increased arrival of immigrants at the southern border for three years. In 2021, he launched his signature policy, Operation Lone Star, under which the state has spent more than $11 billion installing barbed wire along the border and sent more than 100,000 migrants to Democratic cities such as New York and Chicago. In January, the Supreme Court authorized cutting a portion of this barbed wire barrier along the banks of the Rio Grande after three migrants drowned in the area. However, the court order only applied to about 30 miles of barbed wire of a total of over 100 miles installed.

The Operation Lone Star strategy has also led to the apprehension of more than 516,300 migrants who entered the country irregularly and more than 45,300 arrests, according to the latest state government data released last week. While crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border did spike between 2021 and 2023, they have since plummeted. In June they fell to their lowest level in three years, with some 83,000 apprehensions, after Biden implemented a new measure in June that restricts asylum eligibility and facilitates rapid deportations.

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