Heading for the border: Abbott launches Operation Lone Star in response to illegal migrant crisis

Governor Greg Abbott launched Operation Lone Star in response to the growing crisis on the Texas border. The Texas National Guard and Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) are partnering “to combat the smuggling of people and drugs into Texas”.

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White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said on Morning Joe this morning that “we are here because we are humane”. What she either doesn’t understand or is unwilling to acknowledge is that the flood of illegal migrants overwhelming the southern border is not just a matter of human beings of all ages walking across the border. It is the human tragedy of what comes along with the crisis. Drug cartels use migrants as mules for bringing in drugs. Coyotes and other human smugglers are paid to bring migrants to the border and leave them there to fend for themselves. It is not “humane” to give false hope to desperate people with talk of open borders, the kind of talk that results in thousands of unaccompanied minors flocking to the border. It is not “humane” to encourage women and children to take a dangerous journey that often results in rape and physical abuse along the way. Psaki may try to virtue-signal about what humane people the Biden administration are but she is mistaken in her definition of humane.

Abbott is deploying air, ground, marine, and tactical border security assets to high threat areas, as reported by Breitbart.

“The crisis at our southern border continues to escalate because of Biden Administration policies that refuse to secure the border and invite illegal immigration,” the governor said in a written statement Saturday evening. “Texas supports legal immigration but will not be an accomplice to the open border policies that cause, rather than prevent, a humanitarian crisis in our state and endanger the lives of Texans. We will surge the resources and law enforcement personnel needed to confront this crisis.”

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Texas DPS Director Colonel Steve McCraw met with Governor Abbott before Abbott issued the deployment order. The mission is to increase safety and security along the border.

Biden sent a team of officials to check out the border situation and they have now returned to Washington. Yesterday the team said they “hope to” brief the president this week. The lack of urgency seen from this administration is mindboggling. Biden was in office with Obama when the 2014 border crisis surged. That is when the “cages” were built and detention centers increased along the border. He and his Homeland Security secretary refer to the crisis as “a challenge”. All the soft words in the dictionary will not solve the problem. Whether the Biden administration wants to face it or not, the border crisis is here and growing worse by the day.

Border patrol officials are anticipating 117,000 unaccompanied children will arrive at the border in 2021. Officials are expecting to have encountered nearly 400,000 people crossing the border between October 2020 through February.

The Biden administration last week denied a crisis is occurring on the border, with Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas instead describing the situation as a “challenge.”

“The men and women of the Department of Homeland Security are working around the clock seven days a week to ensure that we do not have a crisis at the border — that we manage the challenge, as acute as the challenge is,” Mayorkas said.

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The job of the president is to protect the homeland and that includes its sovereignty. In order to be a sovereign country, our borders must be secure. That falls to the federal government, not individual states. Texas and other border states should not have to take matters into their own hands to protect their residents. Other states will bear the brunt of illegal migration, too. As resources in towns along the border become overwhelmed and depleted, the migrants are sent elsewhere, further into the country. Other states will be picking up the tab and using resources soon.

Rep. Veronica Escobar, a Democrat, is working with the Biden administration to fly migrants from border patrol facilities in the Rio Grande Valley Sector to El Paso. On Monday, two flights carrying a total of 270 illegal migrants arrived in El Paso, according to a local charity group. Escobar holds the seat that was formerly held by Beto O’Rourke. She was a strong critic of Trump’s immigration policies and she is against the Remain in Mexico agreement. She made several trips to border facilities during the Trump administration to criticize the same detention facilities now being used by the Biden administration. Instead of railing against Biden, she is helping to just shift migrants around, away from the border.

Border patrol agents are rescuing illegal migrants in trains and in tractor-trailers on a regular basis. This type of illegal entry is dangerous to both the migrants and to U.S. residents. Migrants are in physical danger as they travel like this and there are also public health concerns during the coronavirus pandemic.

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Jen Psaki should receive a tutorial on illegal migration. None of this is “humane”. Perhaps she and her boss should accompany the next team that checks out the border.

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