In Eagle Pass, Greg Abbott and GOP governors strike familiar themes about border unrest

EAGLE PASS — With the familiar backdrop of camouflage-painted tactical vehicles and National Guard soldiers outfitted in fatigues, Gov. Greg Abbott joined 11 of his Republican counterparts in a show of force at the border Sunday aimed squarely at Democratic President Joe Biden.

"We are here today to send a loud and clear message," said Abbott, wearing a crisp white shirt and a baseball cap as a stiff wind ripped though the now-militarized Shelby Park on the shores of the Rio Grande and in the shadow of downtown Eagle Pass.

And that message, the three-term governor said, was Biden's "abject failure to enforce the immigration laws of the United States of America."

The event came less than two weeks after Abbott in a letter invoked a clause in the U.S. Constitution that he says gives all governors the right to defend their state in the event of an "invasion," which is how he and national Republicans are couching the record surge in unlawful immigration at the southern border.

At a separate event, top Texas Democrats called the Eagle Pass event a political stunt.

But the governors who joined Abbott, including Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas, Brian Kemp of Georgia, Tennessee's Bill Lee and Montana's Greg Giantforte, enthusiastically backed Abbott's claim. Several of them have sent troops from their states' National Guard to the Texas border, and they vowed to keep them deployed for as long as needed.

Before coming to Shelby Park, which has been taken over from the city of Eagle Pass by Abbott's Operation Lone Star, the governors huddled inside a large meeting room at a regional station of the Texas Department of Public Safety about 8 miles away.

Abbott sat at the head of the horseshoe array of tables flanked by Operation Lone Star officials and the governors. During a short session open to a limited number of reporters, Freeman Martin, a top deputy to DPS Director Steven McCraw, briefed them on tactical and logistical aspects of Texas’ border security efforts.

“We're all working together to create the system that we have in place today that allows us to make 39,000 arrests under Operation Lone Star,” Martin told the governors. “That doesn't happen by accident.”

Back at the border, Abbott repeated his criticism of Biden for rolling back many of former President Donald Trump's hard-line immigration policies.

Kemp, the Georgia governor, said the crisis at the border is no longer confined to Texas and its neighbors to the west.

"Every state in our country now is a border state," he said. "And every governor has to deal with it."

In a virtual press conference before the event in Eagle Pass, several Texas congressional Democrats condemned Abbott's gathering as a ploy to whip up fear over the U.S.-Mexico border and elevate his standing on the national political stage.

"Republicans have used this issue as their No. 1 boogeyman, using immigrants and migrants as political scarecrows to create fear and resentment," said U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, whose district includes roughly half of San Antonio. "They do this because they have no other productive solutions on the issues that affect people's lives, whether it's combating inflation, education, health care, creating jobs or much of anything else."

The Democrats said Republicans have rejected immigration reform legislation that could improve conditions at the border in order to continue fundraising and campaigning off of the "chaos." The comments came days after Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson declared that a bipartisan border security bill the Senate spent months negotiating will be “dead on arrival” if it reaches the House.

"All of us on this call as Democrats have proposed productive legislation to tackle the issues at the border, whether it's reforming the visa process, comprehensive immigration reform or some other piece of reform," Castro said. "We have been met by a Republican Party that insists on rhetoric over real solutions and a speaker of the House that is getting in the way of any reform at all.”

Some of the sharpest condemnation came from Rep. Greg Casar, a former Austin City Council member elected to the House in 2022. He called the conference a “press charade” meant to distract voters from more pressing domestic concerns.

“They don't actually want solutions for our immigration challenges,” Casar said. “They want it to look as bad and chaotic as possible for the TV cameras. That way they can get away with underfunding our public schools. That way they can get away with the fact that we have more uninsured people in the state than anywhere else.

"That way they can get away with suppressing work or written wages while they jack up the rents for everyday people,” Casar said.

Abbott sidestepped a reporter's question on whether the legislation pending in Congress would help Texas and other border states.

"I have no idea what's going to be in that Senate bill," he said, before noting that its chances of passing a divided Congress in an election year are slim.

While Abbott addressed the crowd in Eagle Pass, law enforcement remained on high alert because of threats against a migrant processing facility outside of the town, right-wing outlet NewsNation reported. The report said the Border Patrol evacuated the facility Thursday night in response to "two known extremists" threatening to "overthrow it by any means necessary."

Customs and Border Protection did not directly confirm the report but told the American-Statesman it is "taking appropriate and necessary actions to keep our employees and migrants in our custody safe."

"Threats of violence against law enforcement personnel and migrants are unacceptable and CBP takes all threats very seriously," a spokesperson for the agency wrote in an email. "We will remain vigilant and continue to work closely with our law enforcement partners."

The catalyst to Abbott's state self-defense declaration was probably the Supreme Court's ruling that allows federal border authorities, at least for now, to cut the coiled wire the state installed along the Texas shore of the Rio Grande.

Abbott boasted that Operation Lone Star has spooled out 100 miles or more of the sharp wire, much of it in Eagle Pass.

The galvanized wire was easily visible in Shelby Park as it peeked out of a continuous line of giant metal shipping containers separating what had been soccer fields and softball diamonds from the river.

Abbott promised that the park will remain under state control "for as long as it takes." And he brushed aside that the ever-escalating rhetoric over immigration on both sides of the issue might be the harbinger of a second civil war as a "false narrative."

At the assertion that Sunday's event was more election-year drama designed to arouse the GOP and less an effort to solve the border crisis, Abbott pushed back.

"What Americans want — they want law and order," he said.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Abbott, Republican governors at border continue drumbeat against Biden