Utah Gov. Spencer Cox joins 14 other governors in Texas vowing to protect the border

EAGLE PASS, Texas — Utah Gov. Spencer Cox stood at the front line of the country’s roiling immigration crisis on Sunday above the banks of the Rio Grande with 14 other Republican governors and Utah Speaker of the House Mike Schultz.

Flanked by several dozen national guardsmen and a fleet of sand-colored humvees, the governors, led by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, reaffirmed their position in an escalating constitutional standoff with the federal government and placed the blame for the country’s crisis-level immigration surge squarely at the feet of the president of the United States.

“Because of the extraordinary dangers that the state of Texas is facing, as well as states across the country, and because Joe Biden completely abdicated and abandoned his responsibility to enforce the laws of the United States, I have used a clause in the Constitution that empowers states to defend themselves,” Abbott told national media.

On Jan. 24, Abbott declared his intent to mobilize the state National Guard to secure the border — historically, and constitutionally, a federal duty. Citing Article I and Article IV of the Constitution, Abbott said if federal law goes unenforced, and under the conditions of an “invasion,” states are authorized to engage in self-defense.

A day later, Cox, and 24 other governors, signed a joint statement to express “solidarity” with Abbott “in utilizing every tool and strategy, including razor wire fences, to secure the border.”

“It is really important that we enforce the laws of the United States of America. That’s really what this is about,” Cox told the Deseret News following the Texas press conference. “We need a president who will use the tools at his disposal and a Congress that will help fix some of those tools that need to be fixed to solve this humanitarian crisis that’s happening here.”

Abbott and Cox joined the Republican governors of Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, South Dakota and Tennessee on a tour of the border, accompanied by a briefing from Texas border officials on Sunday.

That afternoon, the governors held a media-only press conference, which the Deseret News attended, behind a heavily fortified, razor-wire fence patrolled by the state’s National Guard.

“I felt it was important to come down and see for myself and have these conversations with my fellow governors,” Cox said.

Speaking over bursts of wind and dust, the governors said that Biden could end the border crisis with the wave of a pen by reinstating Trump-era border security measures, like finishing the border wall and implementing the Migrant Protection Protocols, or the “Remain in Mexico” program, which partnered with Mexico to keep migrants on the other side of the U.S.-Mexico border during the entirety of their immigration proceedings — which can last several years.

This approach would prevent the release of millions of undocumented immigrants into the country on parole awaiting a court date, Republicans have said, and changes the calculus for cartels and prospective migrants who are considering making their way, sometimes over thousands of miles, to America’s southern door.

“This is definitely not anything new,” Cox said of the high number of migrants crossing the border illegally, which existed under former President Donald Trump and Barack Obama, “but it is a crisis that is growing to the point where we just absolutely have to do something about it.”

Cox was home from his trip by Sunday evening. At a press conference in Salt Lake City after his return, he expressed concern about the “over 160 people who are on the terrorist watch list in the United States” who have been apprehended at the border.

“Again, those are the people that we know about. So even if it’s less than 1% that are crossing that mean to do harm to Americans, that’s a huge number when we’re talking about 3.2 million people,” he said.

A years-long tidal wave of border crossings seemed to reach an unmanageable zenith last December at the exact spot where Sunday’s press conference was held, just blocks away from downtown Eagle Pass, Texas.

At its peak late last year, border patrol agents in the Del Rio Sector, which includes Eagle Pass, were processing up to 5,000 migrants a day, Abbott said, representing the majority of a record-breaking 10,000 daily apprehensions that the U.S. Customs and Border Protection recorded multiple times in December.

The press conference was held at Shelby Park, which is located underneath one of the two international bridges connecting Eagle Pass to Piedras Negras, Mexico. The park became the go-to image for news in December that U.S. Border Patrol had recorded 302,000 encounters along the country’s southwest border — the most in American history.

These totals came after fiscal year 2022 and 2023 saw the greatest number of border encounters between migrants and field agents since the country began keeping track, with totals coming in at 2.8 million and 3.2 million respectively, according to CBP data.

“That’s basically the population of the state of Utah in one year that crossed the border,” Cox said.

These staggering statistics exclude the number of “gotaways” who successfully evaded Border Patrol agents. During a congressional hearing last year, United States Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas said the number of migrants who entered the country without encountering border patrol was estimated to be more than 600,000 in FY 2023.

The sight of thousands of migrants from all over the world emerging from the Rio Grande, drew what was purportedly the largest congressional delegation ever to visit the southern border to Shelby Park in early January, followed a few days later by a visit from Mayorkas, who is currently undergoing initial impeachment proceedings in the GOP-majority House for an alleged failure to maintain national security and instead fostering a “porous” border.”

Biden, up for reelection this year — as are the 15 governors, has countered that the problem is not a lack of executive action but an outdated asylum process from 1980. The Democratic president has committed to sign a bipartisan immigration package released by Senate negotiators Sunday night. It would first have to pass a gridlocked Congress.

But Utah House Speaker Schultz, R-Hooper, said Abbott’s experiment with state-led – and funded — border security measures is a proof of concept that enforcement of current laws might be more pressing than new legislation from Washington, D.C.

“Just a few months ago there were thousands of people crossing this border every day,” said Schultz, who appeared to be the only state lawmaker in attendance. “And today, there’s three people getting across this border every day. So it shows what the federal government should be doing, not just here in Texas, but all the way up and down the border.”

When asked whether Utah has a unique way of approaching immigration, Cox said Utahns understand “we do need to show compassion to those immigrants who are coming to our state.”

“This is the false narrative that people want us to employ, that if we’re securing the border that means we hate immigrants,” Cox said. “That’s not true at all. In fact, immigrants are in danger because what we’ve done is we’ve just incentivized the cartels who are making hundreds of millions, maybe billions, of dollars off of trafficking people. It’s very unsafe for them.”

Cox said he also thinks lawmakers need to “fix legal immigration so that we’re not forcing people to do it the wrong way.”

The volume of migrants attempting to enter the U.S. illegally dropped precipitously in the first few weeks of the year, according to the CBP.

Abbott has claimed this is a sign his tactics are working. But other reporting suggests the drop may be the result of negotiations between the Biden Administration and Mexican leadership, which has resulted in increased apprehensions and deportations of migrants by Mexican law enforcement.

On Sunday, Abbott, and several of his gubernatorial colleagues, said they would continue to send national guardsmen to the Texas border for the foreseeable future to bring a halt to migrant crossings.

“As we speak right now, the Texas National Guard, they’re undertaking operations to expand this effort,” Abbott said. “We’re not going to contain ourselves just to this park; we are expanding to further areas to make sure we will expand our level of deterrence and denial of illegal entry into the United States.”

In response to an emergency appeal filed by the Biden administration, the Supreme Court said on Jan. 22, that federal officials could cut razor wire installed by Texas along the U.S.-Mexico border if it interfered with their ability to carry out immigration proceedings.

But a national guardsman and border patrol agent, both stationed at Shelby Park, confirmed separately to the Deseret News that Abbott had instructed state law enforcement to refuse entry to the federally-controlled border patrol except in the case of life threatening border crossings of the Rio Grande.

This is the latest in a series of demands by the Biden Administration for Texas to cease and desist, which Texas has continued to flout, making Eagle Pass the epicenter of a high stakes stalemate, with Biden threatening to federalize the Texas National Guard if Abbott does not back down.